{"id":2063,"date":"2014-02-07T18:33:21","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T02:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2063"},"modified":"2014-02-07T18:33:42","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T02:33:42","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e22-los-angeles-music-with-dan-kuramoto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2063","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E22: Los Angeles Music with Dan Kuramoto"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2064\" style=\"margin: 5px; border: 0px;\" title=\"Screen Shot 2014-02-07 at 6.17.22 PM\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Screen-Shot-2014-02-07-at-6.17.22-PM.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Screen-Shot-2014-02-07-at-6.17.22-PM.jpg 300w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Screen-Shot-2014-02-07-at-6.17.22-PM-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles&#8217; Little Tokyo with Dan Kuramoto, founding member of the band <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hiroshimamusic.com\/index.html\">Hiroshima<\/a> who have now played for 40 years and recently released their 19th album, <em>J-Town Beat<\/em>. They discuss what he sees around him in the Little Tokyo in transition today as opposed to the one he grew up in 40 years ago; what it means to play &#8220;Los Angeles music&#8221; in this multi-ethnic city; how the band&#8217;s koto player June Kuramoto learned her classical instrument while growing up in a Los Angeles black ghetto; the question of whether you can build a modern, western band around the koto, which Hiroshima has always tried to answer; how musical traditions with deeper roots cooperate better together; making their musical mixtures work as, in microcosm, making America work; making the still mutable Los Angeles work as, in microcosm, making America work; his time as an Asian-American Studies department chair at CSU Long Beach, and what he found out about Japanese-Americans there; music as a &#8220;way of healing&#8221; from the self-hate he once took from the media; his lunch with Ridley Scott and Hans Zimmer; how it felt to become part of a group considered &#8220;the bad guys&#8221; again in the 1980s, just as Hiroshima really took off; the band&#8217;s first trip to Japan, and the visceral feelings it brought about; the universality of craft as an integral part of Japanese identity; the difficulties companies have had categorizing Hiroshima, and the \u00a0special problems of the &#8220;smooth jazz&#8221; label; his lack of desire to play music for secretaries who just need their afternoons to pass more quickly; how they honed their chops in the Los Angeles black communities, and how black radio gave them their first big push; and the composition and meaning of <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelhornstein.com\/Pictures\/Hiroshima%20-%20Odori.JPG\">the striking cover<\/a> of their second album, <em>Odori<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/colinmarshall\/NCC_S4E22_Dan_Kuramoto.mp3\">here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles&#8217; Little Tokyo with Dan Kuramoto, founding member of the band Hiroshima who have now played for 40 years and recently released their 19th album, J-Town Beat. They discuss what he sees around him in the Little Tokyo in transition today as opposed to the one he grew up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2063"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2066,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063\/revisions\/2066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}