The San Francisco Chronicle carries an obituary for Mark Izu, a composer and bassist who was a central figure in the Asian American arts movement. Mark, who died of colon cancer, was 70.
He curated the first Asian American Jazz Festival in 1981.
It was a creatively fecund time in the city, “with a lot of musicians performing and creating their own music,” Izu said in a 2001 interview. “People were combining different cultures and disciplines and coming up with things that people really hadn’t been doing.”
Kearny Street Workshop, under the direction of George Leong and Paul Yamazaki at the time, was a hub for Asian American musical experimentation. When they had some money left over in the budget they underwrote the first AAJF, a three-day event at Fort Mason Center “that completely sold out,” Izu said. “These were long concerts, with four or five groups a day, and a lot of people came because they had heard of all these musicians but had never seen them.”
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