Omoiyari a song film by Kishi Bashi

Or: “It’s as much about love, as loss.”

How do we reinterpret our past? How do we keep the old stories, of tragedy and resilience, alive, changing to fit a new generation. The singer and composer Karol Ishibashi, better known by his stage name Kishi Bashi, has created an album and film of the same name Omoiyari, dedicated to the victims of Executive Order 9066, that swept Japanese Americans into the Concentration Camps during the war.

Both the film (screened at the Egyptian Theater) and the music that binds it together, are a strange mix of intangible and effecting, like the weather on a fine day. The movie is about the artists own discovery of the history behind the camps and his own growing acknowledgment of his Japanese Heritage, as a man and an artist. Much like the music is layered with tissue thin percussions, strings, and Kishi Bashi’s own voice, an impossibly high kite of a tenor, a long stream and a tiny wink of color against the blue. You need better ears than mine to chase his lyrics up into the sky, but enough words float down to paint a picture, and even as pure tones they are beautiful. Similarly, the movie feathers together historical and found footage from the camps, his own life, past and present, and levitating aerial shots of the now ruined camps and assembly centers.

All this beauty and discovery is the velvet backing of a few hard, sharp stones. These being the racism and greed that prompted the Incarceration, and the long and shameful history of detainment and exploitation that still wrack the country, though this particular cow-pat is dried and hopefully ready to kindle into something warmer; “maybe this time we’ll learn to listen, “As Kishi Bashi sings.

The consort following, lately featuring the artist, his long time companion Tall Tall Trees, and a local chamber quartet, was filled mostly with the full versions of the song we had seen come together in the movie, with a few punctuations like the gripping “Atticus in the Desert.” The style, if you care about such things, dear reader, was Folk with an edge, and a budget, while never losing the of community, the Michele that ran between collaborators old and new and the audience itself.

As we had seen on screen, in the interactions with his family and the survivors (the particularly sharp notes of the film, a close up of a worrying hand, a face fallen in regret and sorrow) Kishi Bashi in person is utterly unpretentious, totally given over to sharing his music, with a virtuosity that passes beyond the masterful into ease. And it struck chords with the audience. All throughout the theater I saw audience members writhe in paroxysm of pleasure as his violin or the assembled strings or Trees’s psychedelic banjo, rapturously transported out of themselves.

And I felt a little touch of it myself when, for the encore, Kishi Bashi and co. decamped from the stage and set up in the aisle asking everyone to gather round. All night in the moment he had been asking us, for the nation, to embody Omoiyari, the considerate caring for others. Now drawn together, listening each feeling that the maestro’s glances into the crowd were for you alone, we had a smallest taste of what that might be.