Anthony Brown was an army grunt stationed in Germany when he first heard Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1966 composition The Far East Suite. Ellington and Strayhorn penned the suite after a State Department-sponsored goodwill tour of the Middle East and Asia in 1963 and a trip to Japan the following year. Their musical portraits of Turkey, Iran, India, and other lands they visited were big-band interpretations of the exotic Orient.
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Brown is singularly suited to the task. His father, an American GI, met his mother, an Isuzu factory worker, in Tokyo shortly after World War II. “My mom and her girlfriends went to the American service club to listen to jazz and dance the jitterbug,” he says. “Dad did too. That’s how they got together.” But Brown’s maternal grandfather objected to the marriage. “He didn’t want an American in the family,” Brown explains, “and my dad being mostly black and part Choctaw Indian didn’t help.”
The Browns returned to the U.S. in 1966, settling in a white neighborhood in Los Angeles. “We experienced abject racism in taunts and stares–quite a shock after Japan,” says Brown.
The Asian American Jazz Orchestra will perform Brown’s arrangement of The Far East Suite at 8:30 PM Sunday at the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park, Columbus and Jackson. Admission is free. For more information about the Chicago Jazz Festival, call 312-744-3370 or see the pullout guide in Section Three. –Ted Shen
