Drawing Energy from the Silence: A Conversation with Jason Kao Hwang on ‘Soliloquies’

In September of 1939, only weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, a 100,000 Imperial Japanese force converged upon the city of Changsha in the Hunan province of China. Ultimately, the Chinese kept their territory in part through guerilla tactics. However, it bore a heavy toll. After the smoke settled, 50,000 were dead, injured, and missing. Many died from poison gas, something outlawed by the Geneva Protocol but to which Japan was not a signatory. Even the victory was fairly short-lived. Two years later, the Japanese tried again. Several thousand more died in the process. By December of 1941, full of hubris from their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese laid siege to Changsha a third time. After killing a little under 34,000 Chinese and wounding another 23,000, the Japanese withdrew again. With their empire crumbling, the Japanese made one final last-ditch effort in 1944 to take the city that had eluded them. Jason Kao Hwang’s parents – Changsha natives- lived through the horror, trauma, and sorrow of these years of near-constant attack. Their experiences were so painful that they refused to talk about them or share them, even with their own son. While not exposed to most of their stories, echoes emerge through the violinist’s solo record, Soliloquies, Unaccompanied Pizzicato Violin Improvisations (True Sound, 2024).

While Hwang has performed solo pizzicato improvisations since the late 1970s, Soliloquies marks the first time they were captured in the studio. The plucked and bent tones evoke the music of his ancestral homeland and other Asian cultures studied and musically experienced by Hwang throughout his career. The fact it is an unaccompanied and unwritten work speaks not only to Hwang’s improvisational prowess – he counts luminaries like Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, William Parker, and Reggie Workman among his many collaborators – but also the internal desolation his parents must have felt surrounded in a world of chaos. Even upon reaching America – the proclaimed land of opportunity – Hwang’s parents found themselves socially isolated as one of the only Chinese families in their chosen new home. That, too, enters into the recording. The absence of other musicians also allows the pieces to be imbued with space and silence, suggesting a dialogue with someone no longer in this sphere.

While Soliloquies is Hwang’s heartfelt and deeply personal tribute to his parents, it is more than that. The album asks the listener to reflect on the narratives and lived experiences of their ancestors and loved ones and to consider ways to honor them. It is also a call for peace in a tumultuous era in which many fear the emergence of a third world war. A call for community and love in a time where the walls of social media far too often separate rather than unite. Soliloquies is a hauntingly beautiful and emotionally raw recording that is difficult to put down.

PostGenre: Soliloquies is dedicated to your parents and reflects upon some of what they experienced in China during World War II. Can you provide a little more context on their story?

Jason Kao Hwang: Well, my parents were originally from Changsha, which is in the Hunan province of China. The [imperial] Japanese tried to capture Changsha four times. My sister ran across an article written by a missionary who was my parents’ teacher. In the piece, they discussed the heavy casualties of these attacks. 

I do know that my mother survived a bombing. She was in a pharmacy, and the bomb knocked her out cold. When she woke up, the building was destroyed, and everybody around her was dead. Actually, she had several survival stories. I think that is why she became such a devout Christian; she had to wonder why she was the one who survived these terrible things. 

I know less about my father’s experiences during the war. But him and my mother were fleeing the front. Both of them were young medical doctors, so they would have seen war wounded patients from either the Civil War with the Communists or war with the Japanese. And I’m sure they were in a lot of triage situations. But their stories are like those of many survivors of war from that generation; they didn’t talk much about it. 

PG: Is that just a generational thing, or do you feel it is primarily that they do not want to relive the horror they experienced?

JKH: I think it’s too terrible to bear. It is similar to some of my musical mentors who fought in Vietnam. They don’t talk much about their war experiences either. I can’t imagine having those images rattling around in my mind. That’s something that I began to ponder and appreciate more deeply as I got older.  And other than that story about the bombing – actually, the story about the pharmacy I learned from my sister – I don’t recall hearing anything about their experiences during the war. 

But even when they reached the [United States], my parents still experienced some isolation. I was born in 1957, when [America] still had a melting pot philosophy of assimilation, in which you become “Americanized.” There wasn’t much encouragement of bilingual education or celebrating your differences. The focus was on blending into mainstream society. Besides us, there was only one other Chinese family in Waukegan, Illinois, where I grew up. 

To give you an idea of the isolation, my father drove down the street in Waukegan one day and saw another Chinese man in a car near him. They were both so shocked to see one another that they honked their horns at each other and pulled into a parking lot. Of course, Mr. Chong couldn’t speak Mandarin, and my father couldn’t speak Cantonese. But they still managed to become friends. My father would go to the library and look at all the phone books for the Chicago area trying to find Chinese names. He would call them and organize picnics at a park. So, they had a lot of isolation. Even within their group, they were sort of like stranded intellectuals. They weren’t from South China. They spoke Mandarin, so couldn’t relate to the people in Chinatown because they were from the South and spoke a different language. 

PG: Your parents spoke Mandarin and English but taught you only the latter. In another interview, you mentioned how you would listen to them speaking Mandarin and hone in on the almost musical qualities out of their inflections. 

JKH: Yeah, yeah. My older sister has been bilingual from a young age. But my parents had  problems getting her to adjust to school. So, when I was born, they decided to speak only English to me. Of course, they spoke Mandarin amongst themselves and with others. There were many times where I tried to figure out what they were saying. 

As an artist, you sometimes ponder on why you create the music that you do. Or, as an improvisor, why your instincts tell you to make a specific musical decision or what attracts you to a particular sound. I have to think that – especially because my parents did not play that much music at home – my musical experience was listening to my parents speak. Their language was very tonal. I can only imagine that it is all a part of me. 

PG: Do you typically take inspiration from “non-musical” sounds when creating music? 

JKH: I think we all do in the formation of our musical language. Musicians listen to nature – to things like birds and wind – to be inspired. You respond to your physical location. You are also taking in the historic vibrations of music of all genres. I think with language or other sounds we hear from people, that their voices and shards of their sounds appear in your own language. You absorb them, and they become a part of your own way of structuring a phrase. I think without a specifically conscious creative process for those things you cultivate an awareness of those possibilities and try to be open to them. 

PG: As far as Soliloquies, specifically, what inspired you to create a fully improvised solo record to honor your parents? 

JKH: I had attempted solo recordings during the pandemic but I wasn’t satisfied with them. In fact, during the pandemic, I composed a lot but used none of it. I had a pile of recordings and kept being too harsh towards them. But there were certain things I liked. There’s one melody that I did incorporate into a piece for the album. When I recorded this album, I thought I would try solo pieces again. I didn’t have a particular strategy or plan. I just set up the microphone and began recording while playing pizzicato. I recorded the first session in about three hours. Then I recorded again for a couple hours the next day. After recording, I realized I had a story from this window of creativity. When I was recording, I was definitely thinking of my parents. But after you record, you reflect upon what you have done and try to listen for exactly what came through you. 

When you’re playing solo, you’re playing your sound into silence. There is an aura of energy in that silence that you’re in dialogue with. I don’t think language can fully convey what that energy is. Some people would say it’s spirits or ghosts, but I think those words are inadequate. Whatever it is called, the silence has an energy that engages you and is reflective.  Everything is vibration. The physical law of conservation of energy says that you can neither create nor destroy energy. And, if that is true, then everything that vibrates on Earth continues to exist, just not in the auditory realm. Maybe those vibrations become light. But as musicians, we bring those vibrations back into the auditory realm. So when you’re playing solo and engaging with silence in that way, you are feeling that energy and drawing out that energy from the silence. 

PG: Wow. So, is that what you enjoy most about performing solo? 

JKH: Yeah, definitely. You’re feeling the breathing of the silence, and then you’re truly not playing alone. I think in a solo recording, there is some type of autobiographical search or reflection about oneself. That is why I called this album Soliloquies.

PG: Often on the album, your playing pizzicato and bending of notes seems to evoke East Asian instruments like the pipa or gayageum. Was that an intentional element of the work?

JKH: Yeah, that’s a great question because I think I contend with those questions as creative choices. If I go back to the ‘80s, when I was just coming out of college, there was an organization called Basement Workshop. It is now legendary in Asian American studies as a group of young people who tried to create an art that honestly reflected who we were because there was almost no Asian representation in the mass media at all. In the [United States], there were no Asian movie stars, novelists, broadcasters, or anything. We were invisible other than the stereotypical images that were in mainstream culture.

I think in that search, I consciously tried to play in a pentatonic scale. Or thought of the Chinese pipa in looking for my sound. Then, I started working with Teddy Yoshikami’s dance company. She had a piece that allowed me to experiment with those elements of my instrument from very early on. Subsequently, I think there’s been an even wider variety of influences. I’ve played with many great bass players and guitarists. But the pizzicato technique is something I got from the pipa that I wanted to see if I could produce in the same way on the violin. Some of the bending of notes, especially the guttural type of inflections, I learned from playing with Korean Gayageum players. 

When I say I studied this music, I learned through my engagement with others. I haven’t checked recently, but there are not actually that many books in English about the technical aspects of Chinese or Korean music. Instead, when you work with a pipa musician and improvise, you always seek empathy. If they play a gesture or a sound, you try to express that you’re listening and reflect their sound back to them or engage them somehow. 

PG: You have been in “jazz” for many years but were originally trained in Western Classical music. Do you feel that background in Western classical has helped you at all in approaching ideas from Chinese or East Asian music?

JKH: That’s a question the answer to which has evolved over time. I had classical training up through high school. But when I came to New York, I stumbled into the loft scene. I was nineteen years old, and many of the musicians I was working with were in their thirties. They had direction and passion. I learned a lot from them. 

Looking back, the New York loft scene was really in its last throes at the time. It was a precipitous collapse of the loft scene. So many people stopped playing, and venues closed. Then, with [Wynton] Marsalis, Columbia [Records], began marketing a new conservative neoclassical idea of jazz that was very removed from the loft scene. 

I’m so glad I experienced the loft scene because part of its aesthetic was having the artist find their own voice, which required challenging their colonized and socialized expectations of things like what is a good sound, what is intonation, and what is vibrato. All those values of good music were not destroyed but were no longer revered in the same way as they once were. I played with more conservative musicians who would tell me that I was trying to destroy those things, but I was just trying to be who I am and express my own voice. At that time, New York itself was also different. My rent was $98 a month. 

PG: Wow.

JKH: It was not a very good place and very small. But it probably costs $3,000 a month now or something crazy. But when New York was in that state of decay, there were a lot of artist spaces. It was very common to go to jam sessions that lasted two hours. And it was in a space where there was no judgment. Everything was accepted. You just played and experimented.

But to answer your question, for a long time, I tried to pursue the complete violin. So, I cultivated techniques associated with Western classical music, but only to get a certain ring from the instrument. A certain sound. It can be very hard to shed those techniques from your sound because the muscle memory is so deep. You spend a lot of your formative years building that muscle memory and you will always deliver that. But now that I am much older, I don’t think it impinges on my language, which incorporates other traditions as well. 

PG: In terms of your influences, one has been Anthony Braxton, whom you have worked with several times. Among other things, Braxton is known for his solo saxophone works. Obviously, you did not work on any of those with him, but do you feel that you learned anything from him that has helped with solo performance in something like  Soliloquies? 

JKH: I would say not. I’m familiar with Anthony’s work, but what I take away from it is the joy when you’re around Anthony. He’s a lot of fun. He has cultivated, protected, and nurtured his joy of creation. Doing so requires an irreverence towards the world and no attachment towards things like status, even though he’s certainly very successful and has attained a lot. His creative impulse is very joyful, if not even innocent. That’s what I love about Anthony. And I think everyone who works with them has felt that. I think that’s what I have carried with me from my experience playing with him. 

PG: To go back to some of your earlier comments, you mentioned what seemed like an almost spiritual element to your interaction with silence and mentioned your mother’s faith. You have also worked with William Parker, who has a theory of universal tonality. Where do you see music in spiritual terms? 

JKH: Oh wow. Well, music is the embodiment of faith, love, hope, empathy, unity, and belief in the future. I think all of those things are qualities embraced by all religions in the world. 

There was an older gentleman named Peter Pohly who loved music and went to many jazz concerts in New York before he passed away. He was one of these supportive souls who went out to listen to music every day of the week. Later, when he passed, I read something he wrote where he said that he listened to the avant-garde because its new language meant there was hope for the future. That thought stayed with me. 

When music is honest and true, it can find a new language and open up new possibilities. And if that language is imbued with faith, love, hope, and empathy, it will resonate. I think those things are why people listen to music; to find entrainment of those forces in the listening experience. It’s very much a spiritual endeavor. 

‘Soliloquies,Unaccompanied Pizzicato Violin Improvisations’ is out now on True Sound Recordings. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Jason is available on his website.