In a move many academics could relate to, Julian Saporiti neared completion of his dissertation wondering if it was worth writing the thing out, only to have maybe three people read it.
He found a wider audience through music, engaging with what he’d learned working on his Ph.D. in Asian-American studies at Brown, as the project No-No Boy.
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No-No Boy performs songs Saporiti wrote from varying perspectives, including those of World War II internment camp prisoners who formed a jazz band, Vietnamese musicians learning about rock ‘n’ roll from American soldiers, a Cambodian-American painter who creates landscapes from his war-torn homeland, and those of his family.
His mother escaped from Vietnam during the war; Saporiti was raised in Nashville, where he’d been a musician before becoming a scholar. He and his musician-academician wife, Emilia Halvorsen Saporiti, now live in Oregon.
Saporiti will speak and perform 5:30 p.m. Monday, in the University of Alabama Student Center (formerly Ferguson) Theater, for the Rose M. Gladney Lecture for Justice and Social Change. The performance will feature complementary images and projections, as stories unfold.
As No-No Boy, he’s released three albums on the Smithsonian Folkways label, the 2018 “1942,” 2021’s “1975,” and last year’s “Empire Electric.” Despite its esoteric origins, “1975” drew more than one million Spotify listens. ‘
This performance at UA will be one of the last chances to see this work live, since after 10 years, the Ph.D. and three albums, Saporiti plans to put this project on hiatus.
“Empire Electric” is noticeably lighter than some previous recordings, reflecting time the Saporitis spent at Blue Cliff Monastery in New York. No Depressions, a roots music journal, described it as “… radiating a newfound compassion, celebrating that every life is an extension of the divine.”
“I think everyone feels the heaviness of the moment,” Saporiti said in…
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