JON JANGTET WITH PAUL FLORES

San Francisco pianist/composer Jon Jang is an artist who minds history and makes history. Over the past three decades he's created a series of jazz-infused works that celebrate, commemorate or comment on pivotal moments in the struggle for social justice, often from a radical political perspective. But Jang isn't averse to stepping into the annals himself, whether serving as the fulcrum in the unprecedented Beijing Trio with legendary drummer Max Roach and erhu virtuoso Jiebing Chen or co-founding Asian Improv Records, a label that's documented the creatively charged Asian-American jazz movement since its inception.

~~~~~~~~

Jon Jang became the first American born Chinese to compose a symphonic work, The Chinese American Symphony, that honors Chinese American history through the accomplishment such as the building of the first transcontinental railroad by Chinese immigrant workers. For almost four decades, composer and pianist Jon Jang gives a musical voice to a history that has been silent. A majority of his works represents a chronology of Chinese American history in San Francisco. The New York Times described composer Jon Jang's music: "In Mr. Jang's suites, saxophones quote Chinese opera interludes, while Chinese instruments roam into blues territory. Like the "Third Stream" composers who married jazz and classical music, Jang honors two idioms without fully merging them." During 1999-2001, Jang toured with the legendary Max Roach as part of the Beijing Trio at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Zurich, Berlin, Milan and the Royal Festival Hall in London.