Steve Griggs’ Panama Hotel Jazz Project w/ Jay Thomas, Susan Pascal, Milo Petersen, Phil Sparks

Earshot Jazz, August 2013

Saxophonist and composer Steve Griggs leads multi-instrumentalist Jay Thomas, vibraphonist Susan Pascal, guitarist Milo Petersen and bassist Phil Sparks in a series of site-specific performances of new Griggs originals, inspired by his research of the historic Panama Hotel.

The Panama Hotel’s story, and likely the significant meaning of its basement contents, remained largely unwritten in mainstream cultural memory until Jamie Ford’s 2009 Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the hotel was built in 1910 and designed by the Japanese architect Sabro Ozasa. The hotel has 101 rooms, still operates today, and is home to the last remaining intact Japanese sento bathhouse, closed in 1964, in the United States.

In Ford’s novel, as in life, the Panama Hotel served as an important location where Japanese families stored intimate tokens in the basement while they were interred during WWII. One token was a fictional record by Seattle jazz musician Oscar Holden with a saxophone solo by a character from the novel. The sound of his music was buried deep in the subconscious of unrecorded memories, Griggs explains in his grant application.

Griggs came to the project somewhat organically: A conversation in Jim Wilke’s basement jazz archives led Griggs to Ford’s book, in which Seattle jazz patriarch Holden is the only non-fictional character. Later, Griggs’ research on a story about grant-seeking tips for artists led him to 4Culture’s Site Specific Program funding for the Panama Hotel.

In research, Griggs has a knack for aiming at the depths of the American experiences of his subjects – for this publication, “Joe Brazil: Justice for Joe” (April 2012), “Duke Ellington Sacred Music Concerts Bless Seattle” (December 2011), dozens of artist profiles and concert previews.

As a composer, too, Griggs has deftly woven in characters rich with life – artist-specific pieces for his 1998 recording session with drummer Elvin Jones, released as Jones for Elvin Volume I and Volume II, arrangements of Heitor Villa-Lobos Brazilian music for chamber jazz ensemble. He won a 2010 Longfellow Chorus Award of Distinction for his setting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Moonlight” to music.

In his current research, Griggs found a need to create something relevant to the audience in the space, he says. For the Panama Hotel Jazz Project, Griggs’ new musical sketches evoke scenes from Japanese American experiences in 1940s Washington and at the hotel, where many of the personal items of interred Japanese still rest.

His new composition “Desert” imagines experiences of a slow, reflective shock of stepping off a bus to a desert internment camp. “Densho” layers a Japanese melodic scale over jazz harmony. “Alley Cat Strut” is a fictional song by Oscar Holden, from Bitter and Sweet. Other titles: overture “Panama Hotel,” “Loyalty,” “Nihonmachi (Japantown)” and “Redress.”

In his site-specific project, Griggs ex­cavates a deep and crucial history. Yet, “There’s so much that’s fresh about it for me,” Griggs says on the phone, the day before the first rehearsal of his eleven originals. What we get is a fresh narrative-music space by Griggs that marries the material and immaterial of memory, which, is how we teach next generations to endure lest culture forgets while mainstreaming progress.

– Schraepfer Harvey