Slant Fails to Do Justice to Key Issues
By Douglass Dowty

A slanted perspective is exactly what the Asian American trio Slant brought to Oberlin this Monday as they performed varied selections, from rock to folk tunes played on bamboo flute, in Carnegie’s Root Room. A blend of visual, spoken and instrumental art, Slant’s eclectic program focused on the roots and experience of minorities and the poorer strata of American society.
Hailing from New York City, Slant’s ensemble includes guitarist Richard Ebihara, percussionist Wayland Quintero and bassist Perry Young. As a group they have performed all over the U.S. and around the world, from Italy to China.
Their performance at Oberlin was not a medley but a collection of medleys, as they performed excerpts from their various shows, calling it a Kaleidoscope Road Show. And though their track record was reflected heavily in a multicultural approach to art, their heavy-handed political overtones seemed to disappoint many attending Obies, who left long before the night was over.
The trio took the stage with a song called “See The Light” that set the tone for the rest of the performance. Though folksy in temperament with acoustic guitar, electric bass and drums, the number failed to cross the boundary of political stoicism. Revolving around a blind man begging for money for eye surgery, the energy and passion of the performance were clear, but lacking was any sort of artistic power to transcend the awkward, cookie-cutter lyrics — “Give me money /[Help me] pay for an eye operation.”
The next selection was a skit, and the band threw down their instruments as Quintero and Young put on outer-space masks and became aliens enrolled in a “Pronunciation Institute.” Though humorous, this striking simile to an immigrant’s experience in modern America proved to be little else than a trite parody. Ebihara recited common tongue twisters to his alien students, who responded with an assortment of groans, growls and roars. One could hardly tell if the aliens were actually trying or simply stupid. In the end, instead of feeling empathy for these creatures, the audience was encouraged to treat them as laughing stocks, a questionable slap-in-the-face to the plight of non-English speaking Americans.
Most of the audience was still present when Slant paid homage to New York street musicians two numbers later. In the first half of this piece, bottles were personified as puppets, highlighting the unusual and inventive spirit of New York’s homeless crowd. Starting with a tenor-range Coke container, the singing bottles eventually expanded into a Jack Daniels bass and Chardonnay soprano, and climaxed in a choreographed fight between Daniels’s American whiskey and an Italian liquor — the latter complete with a wobbly operatic voice. After the bottle musician ran offstage, the act continued with a skilled street artist who walked through the audience playing a tune on a Shakuhachi bamboo flute.
The program continued with a series of skits following the troubles and tribulations of Asian Americans in history — first as wage earners yearning for European women at the Friday dance, then as skilled cooks with a broadcast show called “The Asian-Cajun Kitchen” (ironically set in a prison) and finally as Japanese herded in relocation camps during WWII.
Though commendable for their historical acuteness, none of these renditions could be called powerful, as might be expected considering the racially-charged motifs. It may have been these skits in the end — more like something that might be acted out in a high school social studies class than onstage by a globe-trotting band — that left the audience only half there by the time the final number was performed.
Finishing off the night, Slant performed a version of “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad,” a homage not only to the Chinese who flooded the West to build this country’s railways, but also as a way to tie in Slant’s diverse Asian heritage. In the end, Slant wanted to show that it was not being Asian that connected them in cause, but that they were American as well.