Mark Izu

San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Mark Izu merges Asia’s traditional sounds with African-American improvisation. A third-generation Japanese-American, he has collaborated with Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, James Newton, and Karl Berger, while leading his own ensembles, the J-Town Jazz Ensemble with Anthony Brown and Jon Jang, and the Mark Izu Bass Quartet alongside Lisle Ellis. Critics singled out his 1991 release Circle Of Fire in the East Bay Guardian. Among his scores are a live accompaniment to Sesue Hayakawa’s 1919 silent feature Dragon Painter and music for Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum Take Out, the Greg Chapnick–Sharon Wood documentary Outside In Sight: The Music Of The United Front, and Steven Okazaki’s Academy Award-winning Days Of Waiting. He earned a Dramalogue Award for Best Original Music for his wife Brenda Wong Aoki’s The Queen’s Garden. Asian Improv aRts commissioned him to write and perform “Hibakusha, Survivors!” for an ensemble combining Western and Eastern instruments. Since 1976 he has studied the sho, Japan’s counterpart to the Chinese sheng multi-reed organ, and has appeared with Imperial Court master Suenobu Togi; he served as featured sho player for the 1986 West Coast premiere of Somei Satoh’s Journey Through Sacred Time at the Cabrillo Music Festival. After graduating from San Francisco State University, Izu began performing with alto saxophonist Lewis Jordan while still enrolled; the pair became regular attractions at the Blue Dolphin Club. Adding trumpeter George Sams and drummer Anthony Brown, they formed United Front, which appeared yearly at European jazz festivals throughout the 1980s and issued five albums from 1979 to 1990. Izu has acted as artistic director of San Francisco’s Asian-American Jazz Festival since 1989 and, in 1996, co-directed the San Francisco Jazz Festival’s special project The New Silk Road with Zakir Hussain.