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GEORGE ANAI
Singer/songwriter, George Inai, was born at a cultural crossroads. His family lineage is deeply rooted in Colorado; his father’s father founded Japan Mercantile, now Pacific Mercantile, in downtown Denver’s Sakura Square shortly after his release from a World War II Japanese Internment Camp in Utah. His mother’s father fled an unforgiving sugar beet plantation in Montana to arrive in Denver, where he taught himself to type in order to become a postman.
Growing up in northeast Denver in a culturally diverse neighborhood, Inai’s early musical influences included traditional Japanese music, oddly mixed with a collection of memorable big band swing albums from which he now draws inspiration. Later, while attending Manual High School, hip hop, jazz, and heavy metal music played havoc with his style. Inai moved to California with a Chicano heavy metal band, graduated from the Guitar Institute of Technology, and also studied music at the University of Southern California. He spent time playing with an African-American funk/soul band in Oakland before returning to Denver.
If strong cultural heritage is truly a wellspring for great art, then George Inai could not have a deeper pool from which to draw. As a fourth generation Japanese-American married to a naturalized Mexican immigrant, Inai’s musical inspirations intersect at a cultural crossroads and blaze a new frontier in Western American music.
Inai’s songs are a collection of sounds that weave together the diverse cultural music of his youth. The Mariachi trumpet and accordion evoke the ghosts of Mexico, drawing on stories shared by his wife of her childhood spent along the migrant trail, while the steel guitar draws us just north of the border. His musical stories echo these lives and do not let ghosts lie.
About This Foolish Music
Inai’s debut full-length CD, This Foolish Music, is hardly what it proclaims to be. There is nothing foolish in the lonely and unsettled musings of this musical frontier poet. You can almost hear the road, an unforgiving and restless companion, in every track. Inai has created a truly Western music – an empathetic soundtrack for the kind of thoughtful loneliness unique to the American Southwest that echoes with voices of longing, sadness, restlessness and welcomed solitude. Characters wander in and out of his stories, meeting only by coincidence. Ghostly reminiscences, unfortunate love, and long lost family saints are all banished to the loneliest moments of clarity about yesterday.
George Inai collaborated with Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer, John Macy, legend of the steel guitar (Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Gladys Knight, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Richie Furay) to meld bluesy, Western sounds together with elements of Americana. Christian Teele and Chris Engelman from etown also contributed their talents. Extraordinary keyboardest Eric Moon who has worked with Jill Sobule, singer/songwriter Marcy Baruch and Rick Benjamin-Tebelau, of the Perry Weissman 3, joined the group. Local award-winning artist, Greg Carr, designed the CD’s innovative and eye-popping packaging.