Season 3, Ep. 1: Cruisin' J - Town

We're back! Season 3 of Saturday School will be about Asian American music movies. There weren't enough Asian American musicals to make an entire season about "musicals," but expanding it to "music movies" allows us to include concert movies, films about musicians, and stories that include music in interesting ways. 10 episodes, every Saturday starting today. We bring you Episode 1, recorded from the floor of the UC Irvine library.

Cruisin' J-Town is a 1975 documentary by Duane Kubo, one of the original founders of Visual Communications, the media arts organization that puts on the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. The film, produced by VC, follows the Japanese American fusion band Hiroshima (saxaphonist Dan Kuramoto, koto player June Okida Kuramoto, and percussionist Johnny Mori) as they reflect on how their music is influenced by their Asian American identity and the civil rights movement of the 1960's.