This essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Mit Jai Inn.

It was near midnight on Sunday, and in the back of a warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I found myself pressed up against a cement wall next to a makeshift bathroom, eagerly trying to make out the next act to come across a small stage dimly lit in blue. It wasn’t until Tamio Shiraishi unleashed a noise so piercing and so profound that the crowd dispersed, and a woman and her friend covered their ears in shock. As Shiraishi continued to squeak on his instrument, his eyes simultaneously followed the couple step by step as they moved from the back of the venue and straight through the door.

Walking out of a set may appear rude, but Shiraishi is no stranger to the mixed reactions his music can generate. He is, after all, what is called a free jazz “noise” musician—a musician who plays freely without molding to traditional sounds. And for the last forty years, Shiraishi, seventy-five years old, gray-haired, with bags under his eyes, has been squeaking his way into obscure stardom.

“I play the saxophone like a Japanese sword,” Shiraishi says. “My sound cuts through space. I try to get the noise to rise above the other sounds in the room.”

I first encountered Shiraishi through a friend who told me about a man who livestreams himself screeching with his saxophone in the subway system. I had heard of jazz busking, and even tried it in college with my own trombone, but was surprised to see that Shiraishi did not play any jazz standards and did not even have a tip jar. Instead, I found it refreshing to watch as he stood on the platform in a full suit, not bound by the limitations of a song, not jaded by the immediate judgments of those walking by, but purely getting rich off his own vision of expression.

Shiraishi had grown up in Gunma, Japan, and had studied math in college. Around the same time in the 1960s and 1970s, bands like The Rolling Stones were on the rise and punk rock had everyone dyeing and growing out their hair. Rock led to his interest in free jazz and Shiraishi picked up the synthesizer.

Every so often Shiraishi would play at Club Minor, a Tokyo coffee shop-turned-free jazz venue at night. It was there where he learned how to play aggressively alongside musicians such as guitarist and vocalist Keiji Haino. 

“We played more like we were doing a duel than a duet,” Shiraishi laughs. “We tried to outcompete one another for sound. The tension was very high, often too high.”

All that tension was forced to bottle up under Club Minor as Tokyo was too compact to play outside. Finding space to play a synthesizer would either invite the police to come by, or worse. Frustrated with his two options of competing with Haino or risking public disturbance, Shiraishi needed to find a new instrument.

One day, one of Shiraishi’s friends asked to borrow some money. Shiraishi, out of good faith, did not want the friend to pay him back. But to his surprise, a few days later, the friend returned with a gift: a brand-new alto saxophone.

“It was very strange. I tried it and immediately, I felt it was good for me because it felt more human. A synthesizer required electricity, too much technology. The saxophone was just the right balance.”

While Shiraishi came armed with a new saxophone, the competition at Club Minor continued to boil. Shiraishi would find himself exhausted after trying to keep up with the clashing vocals of the young musicians in the venue. Wanting to try new sonic spaces, he would soon get bolder, experimenting out in public at Shinjuku square, where his sound would reverberate off the sides of skyscrapers, bouncing from building to building.

I grew up in the cornfields of Cranbury, New Jersey. It’s the type of town where folks have to get permission to paint their homes due to historical preservation regulations, where George Washington slept in a barn, and where I was one of just a handful of Asian Americans. Unlike the other Asian immigrant families who had come to America to raise a family later in their lives, I grew up with parents who came to America in their earlier years. Both my parents had gone to school and college in the U.S. and while I was technically the first American-born, I deeply felt in between the internal messiness of immigrant experiences and outside expectations of cultural assimilation.

I was horribly lost. As one can imagine, this confusion does not just go over terribly with parents, but it also begins a long, awkward, and frustrating battle between oneself and the damaging expectations of the “model minority” myth. For the longest time, I was placed in the lowest of math classes and feared visiting Asia because I did not speak the language. Classmates called me a “fake Asian” due to my poor grades, and I came to school feeling inferior.

Now looking back, I laugh. Had I known that there was such a thing as a 0.5 or a 1.5 generation of Asian Americans, had I understood that there was no need to assign a sense of worth to a generation, maybe I would have been less confused?

Nonetheless, the antidote to my confusion became music.

In fourth grade, students who wanted to play an instrument were instructed to list their top three choices, after which a lottery would decide our fate. I wrote down the saxophone, trumpet, and flute, respectively. After five rounds of painstakingly waiting, I ended up with the flute, and the person next to me received the trombone. As soon as she was given the trombone, tears welled in her eyes.

I wasn’t particularly enthused by the flute. All of us prepubescent dudes wanted to play something hardcore, manly, and the flute to our eyes was delicate and stereotypically feminine. So after a diplomatic and tactful parent negotiation that would alter the course of my life, she and I switched.

As my math grades plummeted, my interest in the records of trombonists like J. J. Johnson skyrocketed. Whenever I’d get taunted about being the only Asian not in the “gifted and talented” after-school program, I’d head home and blast recordings of Urbie Green and drown out my hurt feelings by humming Curtis Fuller transcriptions. The trombone was my savior, my outlet to make friends in jazz band, and the ultimate translation device to prove that I could indeed excel in something, even if it wasn’t in the tired old stereotypes.

The history of Japanese jazz is long and storied. “American” jazz had originally made its way to the country in the 1920s, but a cultural shift began after World War II as more Japanese jazz musicians learned the craft overseas and brought it back home. Throughout the 1960s and 1980s, writers like Amiri Baraka and musicians like Sun Ra used avant-garde jazz as an expression of Black nationalism and liberation. By connecting jazz’s traditional call-and-response origins developed through the history of American slavery and melding them with unorthodox and nontraditional improvisation, musicians created a new wave of musical expression. Soon after, music schools like Berklee College of Music began teaching the art form to Japanese musicians like Teruto Soejima and Masahiko Satoh.

While other Japanese musicians were breaking into this wave of music, Shiraishi found it difficult to find new places to play the saxophone.

“It was very hard for me to break into those circles in Japan (outside of Club Minor),” Shiraishi says. “In Tokyo, they don’t have many places where someone can perform if you don’t know anyone.”

In 1990, Shiraishi took a job as a software engineer for SRA America and moved to New York. The company needed Japanese speakers to translate code and computer parts and keep good relationships with American connections. While he’d work during the week, his weekends were often free for him to roam the Lower East Side.

“At night I tried to visit this venue called ABC No Rio,” Shiraishi says. “Every Saturday they’d have a punk music concert and a free jazz concert on Sundays.”

After observing for weeks on end, Shiraishi decided to bring his saxophone to a Sunday concert. Unlike the atmosphere in Japan, where noise musicians gatekept performances and built cliques, Shiraishi was welcomed to join the jam session.

“One of my friends there—he was nineteen, not yet twenty—he would call me, I was already approaching forty,” Shiraishi says. “He called me Tamio. In Japan we usually call older people more formally, but here young guys called me Tamio. It was not polite, but I learned to love it.”

Shiraishi became a regular at ABC No Rio, growing his confidence as a musician through the nonverbal language of saxophone and improving his English backstage with all its jam session informalities.

As my first year of high school came around and my track record of less-than-stellar grades continued, I poured more time into the trombone. Successful jazz band tryouts became regional band acceptances and evolved into all-state band acceptances. Group awards became accompanied by soloist awards. I became a musical glass cannon, replacing any hollowness I felt in my Asian American identity with shiny layers of a jazz obsession.

Ironically, music is quite mathematical, and maybe not ironically, I wasn’t that great of a musical reader. I could never quite focus to read the notes on the page; the fractions behind the musical metrics and spacing always seemed to confuse me. Improvisation was my specialty. If I wanted to play fast and get the audience’s attention with a change of volume, the trombone followed. If I wanted to pause and rip a sequence of smooth bebop lines, the trombone let me put those thoughts from my head into the instrument. Having this level of control was satisfying, being good at something was satisfying.

But after a while, the same instrument that acted as a shiny toy that brought glory and joy became a constraining device, compressing my frustration of identity and validation through its cold metal tubing. No matter how hard I played, no matter how frustrated I was, the trombone could only speak the language of music.

When it came time to apply to college, I had siloed myself with poor grades and a jazz-centric resume to convince myself that music school in New York seemed to be my necessary destiny. That’s what I was meant to do, right? 

In music school, my problems with reading music persisted; so did my frustration with the discomfort I had around pouring so much into trombone out of fear of trying to express myself in other ways. My mother would always say that we humans are creatures of comfort, and I too became that creature, leaning into the passion of jazz not for the musical pride, but the numbing satisfaction it gave me in my confused adolescence. It was time to grow up and face the true music of finding one’s own way; it was time to stop playing the trombone.

After only half a year of music school, I became a journalism student in an attempt to better work on my ability to communicate without the crutch of my trombone. I had been drawn to write about Shiraishi since his self-confidence to play such strange music seemed to be the antithesis of what I had used my instrument for. How could a man own a saxophone and not know a lick of Coltrane, Bird, or Stitt?

At the performance in Greenpoint, Shiraishi’s jaw bounced from side to side as his screeching was complemented with a woman violently shredding on her cello. My eardrums rang as the saxophone’s wail reached stratospheric levels. I thought about my high school band and my former trombone teachers, imagining whether they’d nod their heads in agreement or walk out in horror.

Yet as the room emptied, I stood there, entranced. Shiraishi’s act of true self-expression did not need to demand the attention of hundreds of people. It did not require reading music. He was no longer competing with how loud he could play compared to his peers at the jazz club. His Asianness, Americanness, foreignness, and his musicianship needed no validation, no explanation. He was just there. Performing.

After 30 more minutes, Shiraishi finished and leaned on the corner of the stage, his grayed hair masked by the dim blue lighting. 

“I have no (formal) technique and yet, why would someone like me perform?” says Shiraishi. “I didn’t study music. Music means very little to me financially, it’s just what I do.”

Shiraishi smiled, his lips chapped from the performance and I nodded in agreement. I took the train home and listened to J. J. Johnson, this time without all the baggage of feeling the need to belong. As I bopped my head to the beat, I thought of Shiraishi’s in-betweenness, my in-betweenness. Our connection to this most American of forms.