International Friendship Concert Features Japanese, U.S. Bands at Organ Pavilion September 23

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two days ago (Saturday, September 23) I went to the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for what was billed as the “International Friendship Concert” featuring three bands: the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Training Band, the U.S. Navy Concert Band Southwest, and the Kearny Mesa Concert Band. The show was supposed to run from 1 to 3 p.m. but it actually started around 12:50 p.m. with three numbers by Russ Peck, local theatre organist and associate organ curator, including Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.” I didn’t recognize the two other pieces, though his second one sounded like a Scott Joplin rag. In fact, I was pretty much at sea the entire concert because instead of distributing printed programs, the organizers put up one of those damnable “QR codes” through which you were supposed to be able to download the program to your phone. I don’t do that sort of thing – I’d have to learn how and I’m not sure I want to (most QR codes are blatant and naked fundraising appeals anyway) – though at least there were two MC’s (including a Japanese woman whose accented English wasn’t all that comprehensible, though I give her points for doing her best) announcing most of the selections. The concert lasted nearly two hours and 40 minutes and was apparently the fifth one in an annual series, though the first one in which the three bands played together following their separate sets.

After Russ Peck’s three numbers the concert proper began with three numbers from a Japanese drum circle associated with the band, and then four pieces by the full Japanese band, including Bob Haggart’s and Ray Bauduc’s “South Rampart Street Parade,” the theme from Alan Silvestri’s score for the film Super Mario Bros., a piece associated with Top Gun (though since I haven’t seen the original Top Gun in decades and haven’t seen the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick at all, I have no idea which Top Gun film it’s from), and a quite engaging closer, Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” a song I particularly treasure since it’s about Duke Ellington and therefore it’s one African-American musical genius paying tribute to another. The song featured a vocal by a Japanese band member who sang in a very charming Japanese-accented English, and though part of me wished he’d sung it in Japanese it was fun to hear. The U.S. Navy Band Southwest followed after another brief organ interlude (incidentally the console was kept off stage to make room for the bands, which meant Russ Peck was literally flying blind as he performed) which featured mostly items I’d heard them do at their “Twilight in the Park” concert August 24: the “Liberty Fanfare” by John Williams, written to celebrate the reopening of the Statue of Liberty; Shelly Hansen’s “Seis Manuel,” based on a Puerto Rican dance; “Out There” by Alan Menken from his score for the 1996 Disney cartoon version of The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame; a mashup of themes from the Japanese animé Hal’s Moving Castle and Michael Giacchino’s score for the U.S. film Up; David Foster’s “The Prayer”; and a march by Henry Fillmore called “The Claxon” written in tribute to the automobile horn company of that name.

After yet another organ interlude, the Kearny Mesa Concert Band came on with an “American Fanfare” by Rick Kirby based on the melody of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” a.k.a. “God Save the King.” Then they played a medley of songs from West Side Story (also a selection I’d heard previously in their “Twilight in the Park” concert on August 16); a really charming piece by Leroy Anderson called “Clarinet Camp”; a quite moving and somber arrangement of Samuel Ward’s “America, the Beautiful” (originally the piece was a hymn called “O Mother Mine, Jerusalem”) and Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March.” The conductor asked the audience to clap along with the march, and though we didn’t achieve the fabled precision of the audience at the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert (my husband Charles and I were watching the telecast of that concert and he joked, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?”), we came surprisingly close. The moment that followed was the most embarrassing part of the show: the Japanese woman MC announced that we would then hear brief speeches from Kenko Sako, head of the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles, and Yasushi Kono, lead admiral of the training division of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. (Its rather awkward name is the result of the U.S. decision following World War II that we would never again allow Japan to have a military, so-called; just a “self-defense force.”) Instead Russ Peck started noodling on the organ again, and since he wasn’t on stage there was no way to tell him to stop to let the diplomat and the admiral speak. Ultimately the organ playing ended and the speechifying began – blessedly both Sako and Kono kept their speeches short.

The music that came from the three bands together was the best part of the concert, largely because most of it was plaintive and contemplative rather than big, loud and brassy. The pieces included Samuel Huzo’s “Fantasy on a Japanese Folk Song,” Tokichi Setoguchi’s “Maritime Self-Defense Force March,” Yashinoro Nobuku’s “Memories of Summer” and a theme from an animated Japanese TV series called The 13th Lord of the Shogun. The Shogunate was a period in Japanese history that lasted from 1603 to 1868 and replaced the secular Emperor with a military ruler, the Shogun, until the so-called “Meiji Restoration” of 1868 restored the Emperor from a nominal ruler to fully powerful. The 13th and final Shogun was a weakling named Yoshinobu, who ruled (sort of) for two years until he was overthrown and the Emperor restored. The TV series was centered around him and was in essence a Japanese version of Game of Thrones. The last two songs the three bands played together were Western – David Horsinger’s variations on the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul” and John Philip Sousa’s “Hands Across the Sea,” which Sousa premiered with his own band in Philadelphia in 1899 and got three encores, but doesn’t seem like one of his stronger marches today – but it was the haunting Japanese material that I liked best. Horsinger’s piece was apparently written after an accident at sea that took the lives of his wife and their children, and it had the weight and gravity you’d expect from the dark source of his inspiration.

The concert stretched out a bit too long for my taste, but it was refreshingly low on the bombast brass bands lend themselves to, and though I don’t think it really illustrated the point claimed for it that music is a universal language that brings people together – indeed, the assertion that the U.S. and Japan have an eternal friendship yesterday’s concert was supposed to celebrate is belied by the fierce fighting between them in World War II, and ironically the next and last stop on the Japanese band’s tour is Hawai’i, where the Pearl Harbor attack that got the U.S. into World War II (within living memory of some veterans) took place. The bands’ members played surprisingly well and there were only a few moments of weak section blends, the usual giveaway of amateur or semi-professional bands. All in all, it was a welcome event and I’m glad I went, even though it did stretch out a bit too long for my taste.