No-No Boy

Co-sponsored by the APIDA+ Center, Ati: Wa:oki Indigenous Community Center, and the U.S. Department of Education AANAPISI Program

Vietnamese and Italian American singer, songwriter, and scholar Julian Saporiti details the Asian American experience through his innovative songwriting and multi-media project, No-No Boy. Saporiti (vocals and guitar), is joined by his wife and collaborator Emilia Saporiti (vocals and violin), and Michelle Bazille (bass), for an evening of heartfelt and poignant musical storytelling set to projected archival images.

The Sound, Histories, and Prophecies of No-No Boy

While guest curating two seasons of Moss Arts Center performances, I had the privilege of deeply engaging Virginia Tech students and faculty. The conversations and advice they offered proved formulative to the serious process of selecting artists whose work reflects the campus landscape and expands our collective musical palette.

I was introduced to the multisphered performance of Julian Saporiti’s No-No Boy project on a visit to Nina Ha’s office in the APIDA + Center at Virginia Tech one afternoon. She and I had been making efforts to bring an APIDA + artist as part of my Moss Arts Center curatorship since our initial meeting a semester prior. On this day, our efforts converged. Dr. Nina says, “I learned about No-No Boy when attending a live performance at Boston's Pao Arts Center in 2018. The songs and storytelling were so haunting and memorable that I knew when I became director of the APIDA + Center, I wanted to invite Julian Saporiti to showcase his amazing talents at Virginia Tech. Thus, I'm really excited to collaborate with the Moss Arts Center and the ICC to have No-No Boy interact and engage with the Virginia Tech community because of its social justice mission, community engagement practices, and educational philosophies.”

On that afternoon, Dr. Nina told me that the term “no no boys” was a nickname given to Japanese American men during World War II who answered back-to-back interrogations of their American allegiance with consecutive “no’s” on a loyalty questionnaire. Saporiti once said in an interview, “Music was the way I needed to tell this story ... I also looked to my own Vietnamese War-torn history and other stories of Asian American experience."

Saporiti’s artistry brilliantly expresses his ethnomusicological proclivities as folk, Americana, and indie rock sensibilities to exalt lesser-known narratives of the Asian diaspora. To showcase his musical polymath as part of my final season as Moss Arts Center inaugural guest curator is an immeasurable honor and a worthy epilogue.

— Guest Curator Shirlette Ammons

About Julian Saporiti

Saporiti’s knack for melody and the directness with which he sings make the picture whole. Without pretension and preachiness, listeners are drawn into the world of real people and their struggles while also being uplifted by melodies that tug the heart and ears in several directions at once. With the sincerity of a folksinger and a master producer’s ear for minutia, Saporiti probes the edges of pain for joy, using history and its remembered landscapes as a way to understand the ground on which we now stand.

Storytelling has always been at the root of Julian Saporiti’s music as No-No Boy. The project developed as the central component of Saporiti’s Ph.D. at Brown University, drawing on years of fieldwork and research on Asian American history to write folk songs with uncommon empathy and remarkable protagonists: prisoners at Japanese American internment camps who started a jazz band, Vietnamese musicians turned on to rock ‘n’ roll by American troops, a Cambodian American painter who painted only the most beautiful landscapes of his war-torn home. Along the way he started to draw on his own family’s history, including his mother’s escape from Vietnam during the war.  

His 2021 album, 1975, was called "remarkably powerful and moving,” by Folk Alley and “gentle, catchy and accessible folk songs that feel instantly familiar," by NPR — a contrast that gets to the heart of Saporiti’s songwriting.  

After the completion of his Ph.D. and the release of 1975, Saporiti found himself at an impasse. Seeking refuge from a bleak future of academic posturing, Saporiti — along with his wife and collaborator, Emilia Halvorsen Saporiti — decamped to Blue Cliff, a monastery in New York state founded by celebrated Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and writer Thích Nhất Hạnh. There, they recalibrated. Sitting and breathing opened up a calm space for Saporiti to begin to reapproach many of the stories he’d collected as a part of his research with a new perspective, one rooted in raw honesty and a rejection of perfectionism. 

Empire Electric, the third album by No-No Boy, examines narratives of imperialism, identity, and spirituality. It tells stories rooted in years of research and relationship-building, made vibrant and profound through a rich congregation of instrumental, environmental, and electronically manipulated sounds from Asia and America. Every single sound, from the gracious swell of a pedal steel to the warbling pluck of a koto, becomes a part of the poetic recasting of shared post-colonial trauma and the startling joys that can be wrung out of that hardship. 

Little Monk, which Saporiti describes as the heart of Empire Electric, is a rare autobiographical song that reflects on the process of opening up that began at Blue Cliff. Mekong Baby was written and recorded almost entirely on a sampler while Saporiti sat in Tryon Creek State Park in his new home of Oregon, taking the sounds of nature and transforming them into a prismatic soundscape of wind rustles, chirps and syrup-slow bird songs, and gentle drum machine. He’s joined by the Vietnamese singer Thai Hien, the daughter of ethnomusicologist and Folkways Records compiler Phạm Duy, their voices blending into a pan-Pacific chorus of yearning, Saporiti’s birdsong overlaid with field recordings from the war. Though the destruction and heartbreak of the past is only hinted at in the lyrics, its sound sits just underneath it all, barely perceptible.  

Saporiti talks about these techniques as “bridging space” between Asia and America, creating a sonic manifestation of the places lost to conflict. “I’m sampling instruments from a place that is very difficult, or impossible, to get back to,” he says. “If you’re born into one of these families like I am, your mom’s country doesn’t exist anymore, or its name has changed. The country she was born in was French Indochina, and then South Vietnam. How do you find that place that only exists in the past?” If you’re Saporiti, you take an instrument native to that place, in the case of the song Nothing Left But You, the monochordal dan bau (a Vietnamese monochord), and you sample it, layering until it becomes a wobbling organ drone: a foundation to sing the place back into life, if only for a few minutes.

This is the first performance by Saporiti at the Moss Arts Center.