The Brooklyn Rail

Even in our time of national discord and divided politics, few issues are as explosive as immigration. Trump uses language borrowed from the Nazis to describe immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden proposes legislation that offers the hopeful-sounding “pathways to citizenship,” while those engaged in the process say it is too mired in bureaucracy to be effective or to address the scale of the problem.

What gets lost in these rancorous debates is any sense of the fundamental importance of immigrants to the health of the United States. America was literally built by waves of immigrants, and continues to rely on this group to fill a vast range of jobs. We used to hear inspirational speeches about the promise of immigration, how it served both the needs of people seeking refuge and the country in which that refuge was sought. But the current climate is much darker, and amounts to a renunciation of that hope, whether through overt racist demonization of immigrants or through half-stepping measures that combine a nod toward the reality of the situation with a display of “get tough” politics intended to pacify nervous voters.

For the United States to be considered a respecter and protector of human rights, it must first actually value immigrants. With that comes a recognition of the strength found in hybridity. In the arts, as in many other areas, we can see and feel what is gained by drawing from and combining the best qualities of diverse cultures.

Pianist, accordionist, and composer Shoko Nagai is a case in point. She immigrated to this country from Japan in the late ’90s. After studying at Berklee, she began to work in a variety of contexts, then recorded a stunning album in 2003 called Vortex. This marked the beginning of her collaboration with percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, one that has evolved in a number of different directions. Another key player on the recording is saxophonist Sam Newsome, who gives splendid voice to many of the lead lines. Nagai’s moody, jazz-inflected compositions are full of lyrical passages, and open to influences that range across a wide spectrum. They are both delicate and surging with uncommon strength.

Since then, she has continued to broaden her playing, performing with the klezmer ensemble Isle of Klezbos, as well as in a number of classical and avant-garde contexts. In recent years, she has assembled a band called Tokala, which explores the different sounds and styles that made their way to Japan along the Silk Road. The group had a larger iteration when it began about six years ago, but has settled into a trio. The two core players are Nagai and Takeishi, with the third spot sometimes filled by guitar or trumpet, but currently held down by violinist Sita Chay.

Tokala moves all over the map—appropriate, given that the Silk Road spanned roughly 4,000 miles—but shows a particular fondness for rollicking Balkan and Middle Eastern tunes. In a recent performance at Barbès, they revved up the crowd with bracing squalls of music. Satoshi makes fantastic use of his minimal kit, playing with precision and power, and Chay brings a plaintive longing to many of these songs of loneliness and hard living. Nagai is an engaging singer and highly sensitive player, whether on piano or accordion. She reminisced about her own recent trip back to Japan, which she said was “soooo nice,” especially Hokkaido, which she described as a kind of paradise. But she returned to the hurly-burly of New York City, and some of the tunes—like one with a rousing, shouted chorus of “Washoi, washoi!”, urging strength and heartiness and meaning “To lift up our life”—could be read as her own response to the realities of being a musician in this often challenging environment.

The Silk Road makes for an interesting point of historical reference in the ongoing debate about immigration. Essentially a trading route that lasted about 1700 years, from the second century BC to the mid-fifteenth century, it allowed for the passage of goods between vastly different cultures; its name derived from the system that brought Chinese silk to Rome. The trade brought lots of other materials in both directions (from the East, tea, dyes, perfumes, and porcelain; from the West, horses, camels, honey, wine, and gold), leading to the proliferation of gunpowder and paper in all the major stops along the route. The mixing led to new artistic combinations along the way, such as the presence of Greek and Indian elements in Buddhist art. In the present day, the name Silk Road is shorthand for cultural cross-pollination, and is used to that effect by the ensemble founded by Yo-Yo Ma and now led by Rhiannon Giddons.

Of course, despite its seductive name, the Silk Road was hardly a bed of roses; its great length meant it was difficult to secure, so robberies occurred often, and the Black Death is thought to have been spread by travelers along its various routes, whether southern from China to Pakistan or northern from Xi’an across the Taklamakan Desert. It’s possible to see aspects of this in current migration patterns, even though the flow of goods is less the issue than people leaving sometimes dangerous and impoverished homelands. It’s still a messy, difficult, perilous journey, and it continues relentlessly.

Listening to Nagai got me thinking about two very different musicians who recently passed on. One is Ryuichi Sakamoto, a prolific, genre-spanning and style-expanding musician, who combined elements of Japanese music with a broad range of global styles to create striking, memorable compositions. He applied his talents to a number of film scores, winning an Oscar in 1987 for his haunting work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Yet he was as likely to credit Claude Debussy or Ornette Coleman for the development of his style as the traditional music of his country. Another is the Cajun accordionist Jo-El Sonnier, who was not an immigrant but certainly an outsider, having grown up in French-speaking Louisiana. He started as a childhood performer, and despite autism, helped carry his native music to the world through his playing and his choice covers of Richard Thompson and others. Nagai herself performed as a child, having been trained in the Suzuki method on the Electone organ. And having traveled halfway around the globe, she continues to cross borders musically, taking the listener down unfamiliar but promising roads.

Nagai will play gigs in March with Tokala at Barbès, as well as with Romanian singer Sanda Weigl, and in other settings elsewhere as well. Like many working musicians, she traverses the world and invites us along for the journey, making us the beneficiaries of her expanded view. Despite the rantings of the doom-mongers and nativists, immigration won’t destroy us, but will rather enrich our country. All we need to do is live up to our national creed, and support those who have built, and continue to build, our imperfect but still surviving union.