GenRyu Arts: Gen Ensemble, Gen Taiko, and Odori School

The GenRyu Arts has produced over 20 full evening length concerts at the Japanese Cultural Community Center of Northern California, Gershwin Theater at the University of San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Grand Performances in Los Angeles, Asian Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago with its ensemble members, guest artists, and students featuring traditional works, as well as original music and theater pieces. An average of 25 public performances every year at various community events and festivals including appearances at the Japantown Peace Plaza, San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Asian Art Museum, and school performances through Young Audiences of Northern California.

Photo by Bob Hsiang

Genny Lim is San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate emeritus. Lim’s award-winning play, Paper Angels, was the first Asian American play aired on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1985 and has been performed throughout the U.S., Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author, along with the late Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, which won the American Book Award in 1980.  Her recent anthology of Senior Asian American memoirs, Window: Glimpses of Our Storied Past, includes the stories of former World War II Camp survivors.  Lim has worked with past Jazz legends, such as Max Roach and long-time collaborators, Jon Jang, John Santos, Francis Wong and Anthony Brown. She is a member of The Last Hoisan Poets with Nellie Wong and Flo Oy Wong, who recently collaborated with Del Sol String Quartet in the United States of Asian America Festival.

Drummer/percussionist Karen Stackpole started out as a rock drummer in the late ‘80s and became fascinated with improvised music and multi-media collaboration. She joined forces with SF Bay Area musicians, playing new music and stretching beyond established boundaries as well as working with dancers and experimental film. In 1991 she was exposed to the wonder of gongs (Paiste in particular) and immediately altered her trajectory to incorporate these incredibly versatile instruments into her musical vocabulary. 
In her explorations of metals, she has cultivated some distinctive techniques for drawing harmonics out of tam tams with various implements: rubber mallets, felt and yarn mallets, ball chains, bass and cello bows, kitchen utensils, and other small objects. Karen specializes in dynamic soundscapes and textures, but has also contributed gong sounds to more conventional musical genres as well as contributing source material for film soundtracks.

She is active in the creative music scene and has participated in music festivals and performed solo in Seattle, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, and the Bay Area as well as collaborating with other gongists from the UK, Poland, and the US. Over the years she has played with Gino Robair, John Schott, Vinny Golia, Myles Boisen, Moe Staiano, Chris Heenan, Rod Poole, Steve Roden, Dean Santomieri, Le Quan Ninh, The Bay Area Chamber Symphony, Mark Growden, Malcolm Mooney, and others. In addition to solo work, she performs and records with various projects including Machine Shop: Live Amplified Gong Experience (a duo with electronics master, Drew Webster), Sabbaticus Rex, Ghost in the House, the improvising quartet Vorticella, the Francis Wong Unit, and the rock band Steel Hotcakes.

AK Black (writer, rapper) was born in Sunnydale and raised in Bayview Hunter’s Point, San Francisco. He began rapping in 1987, as a way of expressing social and political concerns that plague Black communities and other communities of color. AK Black broke into the Bay Area hip hop scene in 1991, and has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe, appearing with such artists as Genny Lim, Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians, Midnight Voices, Piri Thomas, Quincy Troupe, and Francis Wong.

Clare “Jiro” Hess is a life-long model builder and has been building wooden ship models for nearly 30 years. For the last 7 years, he has focused much of his attention on researching and modeling Japanese traditional watercraft or “wasen”. He has studied the details of Japanese wooden boat construction under Mr. Douglas Brooks, an American boatbuilder, who himself has studied Japanese wooden boatbuilding for 25 years under master boatbuilders in Japan.

In 2016, Clare Hess made a research trip to Japan to study wasen first-hand, and has since attended Zoom-based meetings of the Wasen Study Group run by Professor Masaaki Kon of Kanagawa University. He is the author of three articles on modeling Japanese traditional boats, and has given presentations on the subject, most recently for the San Francisco Maritime Park Association’s web-based MESS lecture series in May, 2021.