For Dr. Julian Saporiti, No-No Boy is an ongoing research project, an adventurous sound experiment, and an outlet for his brainy and bright folk songs. While it began as a path to a PhD in American studies and ethnomusicology it has since become so much more.
“It’s a place-making project for myself,” he told the Mercury. “It’s like a cartography of the soul, if you want to be really pretentious about it.”
Saporiti is self-deprecating by nature, but there’s nothing pretentious about No-No Boy, the musical project he started while attending Brown University in Rhode Island. Originally a vehicle for his doctoral dissertation, Saporiti has now produced around 100 songs and three albums under the moniker, including Empire Electric, released September 29 by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Saporiti will celebrate the new album Wednesday with an evening of live music, storytelling and multimedia history presentations at the Mission Theater, as part of the McMenamins History Pub series and co-sponsored by the Oregon Historical Society and the Japanese American Museum of Oregon.
But back to the soul cartography: Saporiti was born and raised in Nashville; his father was an Italian American musician and his mother a painter who fled war in Vietnam in the 1970s.
“I felt like the map I was given was very burnt or blank when I was a kid, as far as who I am. And this is very common for the kids of refugees or people of mixed race or any number of marginalized…
Read the full article here