No-No Boy is the stage name of Julian Saporiti, an indie-folk singer-songwriter whose music is like nothing you’ve ever heard — or seen — before. In a performance at the Granoff Music Center on April 2, Saporiti performed a selection of songs from his new album, “Empire Electric” (2023), along with several songs from his earlier projects alongside his wife and creative partner Emilia Halvorsen Saporiti. With a unique blend of music and history, Saporiti’s performances explore stories of the Asian experience in America, from both his historical research and his own life.
Saporiti’s background is not that of a typical musician — he studied music at Berklee College of Music and spent his 20s in an indie-rock band before entering the world of academia, where he focused on researching untold historical narratives of Asian Americans. For his Ph.D in ethnomusicology and American studies at Brown University, Saporiti returned to his love of music, writing more than 100 folk songs for a dissertation that incorporated his own historical research to tell deeply personal stories of imperialism, identity and intergenerational trauma.
“I had done so much research in grad school. I started grad school in 2012, and by 2016, I started writing these songs,” Saporiti said. “And because I had been a musician for 10 years of my life and done it as a full time career, I knew that was the best way for me to communicate with the world, way beyond [how] academic papers would ever be able to.”
Saporiti takes a uniquely multimedia approach to music making — his performance at Tufts featured visuals projected on the wall behind him, including images from his own travels and historical research; and many of the songs incorporated layers of sound, using archival recordings from historical sites and audio recordings from his own travels to create an immersive sonic experience. His song “Mekong Baby,” which explores his mother’s relationship with her home country of Vietnam, is what Saporiti describes as a “sonic collage.” The song includes nature sounds from both Vietnam and his mother’s current home of Oregon, along with recorded vocals from Vietnamese pop singer Thai Hien, who accompanies Saporiti’s live vocals to create a “jagged duet in two different languages.” The song’s percussion is created from archival recordings of gunfire from the Vietnam War, which emphasizes the lasting impact of war on the country and its population.
Saporiti describes No-No Boy as a “placemaking project” that helped him discover parts of his own identity that were previously unexplored.
“Growing up in Nashville in a mixed-race refugee family, place wasn’t something that could be taken for granted because my mom doesn’t have a place to go back to, and we didn’t have a lot of family around,” Saporiti said. “So this was finding lineages, finding histories that I could call my own, whether that was because they were also musicians or because they kind of looked like me or experienced the same things.”
Saporiti’s performance was introduced by Diego Luis, a history professor at Tufts whose research focuses on Latin American history. Luis is a longtime friend of Saporiti and a former classmate of his at Brown, and research from his recently released book “The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History” served as inspiration for one of Saporiti’s songs. The song, titled “1603,” tells the story of Antón Tomás, a man from India who made a daring voyage from Mexico to Oregon.
Saporiti also wants his audiences to rethink what it means to be Asian American. By reimagining traditional narratives of Asian immigrants and emphasizing the broad historical scope of Asian immigration, Saporiti hopes to teach listeners that Asian American stories are “not just dumplings and trauma.” His songs cover a wide range of topics drawn from his research and travels, including “Crystal City,” which describes the experiences of Japanese Americans interned in Texas during World War II, and “Close Your Eyes and Dream of Flowers,” which describes his visit to an ICE detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Audience members were especially riveted by “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming,” a joyful folk song that describes the George Igawa Orchestra. This big band formed inside a Japanese American concentration camp in the 1940s. Before the song, Saporiti described how his research and travels in Wyoming led him to discover the band’s story and eventually allowed him to connect with several of the band’s surviving members.
During a Q&A session after the concert, audience members shared how Saporiti’s music resonated with their own personal experiences, and Luis praised Saporiti for his ingenuity and his ability to tell historical narratives in a novel way.
”[The project] is inspired from things that you've read — primary sources, libraries, archives — but knowledge doesn't only lie there, right? To notice things, to experience the world, to see the places that you've read about, you have to go somewhere,” Luis said. “Doing that work makes you feel something … and you can create something from that. I think oftentimes, the thing that you end up creating is an academic paper, which is fine, there's a time and place for that … but that's not to say that's the only thing you can create. And I think that the No-No Boy project is an excellent example of how you can use your own talents to express that emotion that you get from doing the work.”
“Empire Electric” is now streaming on Apple Music and Spotify.
