Los Angeles Times Life & Style "One World, One People" by Duane Noriyuki Times Staff Writer

The song, being taped in a Santa Monica recording studio, is included on Miyamoto's third recording, her first since "Best of Both Worlds" in 1983. Ten years earlier, she, Chris Iijima and Charlie Chin recorded "A Grain of Sand." It was subtitled "Music for the Struggle of Asians in America." It was the first album of contemporary Asian American music, earning it a place in the Smithsonian Institution.

It was an attempt to give voice to what some people termed the "silent minority," Miyamoto says, and it grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. When people think of the movement, they think of African Americans and Latinos, but it encompassed Asian Americans and Native Americans as well, all people outside the mainstream.

Miyamoto at the time lived in New York, where she met a woman named Yuri Kochiyama, an activist in Harlem who introduced her to a group called Asian Americans for Action.

"Most of the concern then was on the World War II camps and Vietnam, the fact that every day we were seeing news clips of Asians being killed-again. From World War II to Korea to Vietnam, three wars in which Asians were body counts. There also were questions of our own self-identity. If we walk down the street, we're a gook or a Jap or a Chink. We were trying to raise consciousness."

In New York, the Asian American movement was embraced by groups representing other people of color. There was a common bond, a shared vision.

"We've been inspired by black culture and black militancy and black activism, and through that, the music and the art and stories have been coming out," she says. "It's only been 30 years....It's a process that we're still in, creating new things, creating our voice, and that voice may not be a pure Asian thing, because we're not pure Asian anymore. We grew up in black neighborhoods, Chicano neighborhoods. We grew up around mainstream culture, so our culture is an amalgam of many things."

The new recording is called "To All Relations," translated from the Lakota expression "Mitakuye Oyasin." It is, Miyamoto says, a "gathering of tribes" created by a diversity of instrumentation: the raindrops of the Japanese koto, deep thunder of taiko, whirlwind rhythms of Nigerian talking drums.

It is being recorded by Bindu, a record label Miyamoto co-founded this year with producer Derek Nakamoto, a studio musician, arranger and producer who has recorded with the Pointer Sisters, members of the Jackson family, Holland-Dozier-Holland and, more recently, Keiko Matsui.

"Best of Both Worlds" was the first album he produced. He eventually became musical director for Great Leap, Miyamoto's nonprofit agency founded in 1978, and started his own studio and publishing business, Poi Dog Music.

Great Leap focuses on educating through the performing arts. It supports original music, drama and dance that present a more holistic view of the Asian American experience. Miyamoto, the group's artistic director, recently co-directred "Laughter of the Children of War," created by Club O' Noodles, a Vietnamese theater group.

Bindu's focus will be on multicultural music and is a continuation of Miyamoto's efforts to give voice. Its first release featured the Nigerian talking drums of Francis Awe.

Some of the songs are taken from Miyamoto's autobiographical , one-person play. Like her first album, it is called "A Grain of Sand." It describes her journey from a World War II work camp to screen and stage, from the cover of Newsweek and "The Ed Sullivan Show" to the streets of Harlem and the chaos of People's Park.

At 14, Miyamoto danced in the film "The King and I," starring Yul Brynner. She was a lead dancer in Broadway's "Flower Drum Song" at 18. Discouraged and frustrated by the limited and steretypical roles available to Asian American performers. Miyamoto thought she had broken through the color barrier in 1961, when she performed in the film "West Side Story." She played a Puerto Rican.

Miyamoto continued working in stage and film until 1967. "She could have had anything, theatrically, she wanted," says Krishna Kaur, a friend from childhood who also danced on Broadway, "She was that good."

But, instead, she walked away.

In 1968, Miyamoto began working for an Italian filmmaker who was making a docudrama about the Black Panther Party. The work took her to the streets of New of New York, where she learned about struggle and oppression and poverty.

She went from singing Gershwin tunes in a Seattle nightclub to reading and listening to the words of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, and became involved with Asian Americans for Action.

"That's when I immersed myself," she ways, "and I could never be the same after that....For the first time in my life, I knew I was doing the right thing, and I knew that I was getting involved in something that was more important than my own self.

The experience shaped her in all ways. It molded her as an artist and placed her on a new path for the way she lived her life. It led her back to L.A., where she had roots.

The wind that blew then, and now carries her through this journey, is strong. It comes from a place deep within, from a vision of the world as one community, where neighbors look beyond boundaries, beyond color, beyond time. Through her work with Great Leap and now Bindu, she creates her own wind and poses her own questions.

What is the color of love?

It's the question and title of one song on the new recording. It describes how she fell in love with an African American, Attallah Mohammed Ayubbi, how he was killed in a mosque, how she gave birth to his son, who was 7 years old when he heard a white neighbor in the Crenshaw area scream at his mother, "You should be ashamed for having a black child."

Miyamoto wrote a letter through an attorney and sent it to the woman and the landlord, hoping for an end to repeated invectives. The landlord, a Japanese American, resolved the issue by evicting Miyamoto and her son.

Another son, "The Chasm," describes how flames burned all around her home during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, how she drove through streets of ruin and chaos: "I stop at a light. A young black man looks at me-fire in his eyes. He sees in me the enemy. No time to say, 'Hey, I loved Malcolm," Or, 'You could be my son.' "

These are some of the stories of "To All Relations."

Recording of "To All Relations" started exactly one year after the death of Miyamoto's mother, Mitsue Miyamoto. She suffered a series of strokes and was living in a nursing home. In her final months, she could no longer speak.

Their only way to interact was to play catch with a bean bag. Initially, Miyamoto could stand across the room and throw the bean bag and her mother would catch it and laugh. As time passed, the distance shortened.

Miyamoto's dancing career was her mother's dream. From the time she was young, shortly after the family was released from internment, Mitsue enrolled her daughter in dance classes.

At one point, she was taking 18 classes a week at the American Dance Academy in Hollywood. Dance became Miyamoto's friend as the family moved from Montana to Idaho after World War II, then to Utah and back to L.A., where Miyamoto attended five elementary schools.

Before the war, her father, who was half white, worked as a truck driver, hauling produce for Japanese American farmers in the Imperial Valley. During the war, while the family was imprisoned, his partner lost the business.

After the war he worked as a gardener and eventually bought a gas station at La Brea and Venice. He loved classical music and was a knowledgeable listener. Miyamoto's childhood memories are filled with music.

The civil rights movement drew support from individuals but not necessarily from entire families. From the time she was young, race was an issue that stood between Miyamoto, the oldest of three children, and her parents.

In school, she learned everyone should be treated equally, but the unspoken reality at home was that bringing black friends to the house would be viewed in terms of "What would people think?"

"The hardest thing I ever had to do was to tell my mother I was pregnant and the father was black," she says. "She was a seamstress and she was sewing me a pair of pant.s I trie dthem on and told her they weren't going to fit for much longer, and I explained why."

She met Attallah Mohammed Ayubbi in 1972 when she attended a meeting of black activists. He later heard her sing in front of the United Nations building for a rally of the Republic of New Afrika, a black nationalist group.

"You couldn't find two more different people, but that's what the movement was about," Miyamoto says. "We had a common vision and that's what connected people from very different backgrounds during a time of turmoil."

When Miyamoto told her mother she was pregnant, her mother stayed in the bedroom and cried for three days. She wouldn't speak to her daughter throughout her pregnancy. Eventually they found common ground. It took a baby. The day Miyamoto returned home from the hospital, her mother visited. She brought chicken soup.

She saw the baby, Kamau Miyamoto Ayubbi, picked him up and embraced him into her life. Kamau's father was killed during an ambush on a mosque and never met his son.

In the three years before Mitsue Miyamoto's death on Oct. 3, 1995, before she became so ill she couldn't talk, mother and daughter tied together many loose ends. Mitsue, 80, had always said her mother, Miyamoto's grandmother, died of a broken heart.

But before she died, Mitsue explained that her mother had committed suicide by drinking Lysol. More than one heart was broken. She talked about her anger during and since the war, when the family was imprisoned, and how she had always wanted to be an artist, finally placing her dreams in the life of her daughter.

Miyamoto was with her mother when she died. She sang to her a song she had been writing furiously before her mother’s death. Titled "Mitsue’s Song," it, too, is on the new recording…

…Then Miyamoto sang the chorus: "The soul shall be free."

Mitsue gasped for air, then gasped again. Miyamoto noticed her mother’s legs turning blue but kept singing. "Then I saw a tear from her eye," Miyamoto says. "And that was the last thing."

Bindu was created largely from her mother’s legacy, a final act of passing on a dream. Mitsue’s passion for the arts, her joy of dance and her ability to rise above are part of the Bindu’s provenance.

"In a spiritual sense, her mother’s foresight and her mother’s passing allowed all this to happen," Nakamoto says. "We’re all very respectful of that. This wouldn’t mean anything without a soul, and Nobuko’s mother is a large part of that soul."

They begin with the early morning sun on their backs, casting long shadows against a bamboo mat along the back wall behind their Mid-Wilshire home. Miyamoto and her husband, writer Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, begin the slow, flowing movements of t’ai chi chuan. They are from different worlds, but their shadows, like their lives, move in unison, intermingle and at times become one.

They breathe silently, focusing on each movement. Their concentration is timeless and deep, like the sway of the ocean. T’ai chi takes them to a sacred, inner self, uncluttered and pure. It’s like rising through clouds to a clear, boundless sky.

It is a hectic time in their lives. Kirkland’s play, "Ritual of a Bob Solo," has opened, and Miyamoto is recording and preparing to perform "A Grain of Sand" at Ball State University.

They met 10 years ago, shortly before rehearsals started for a play Kirkland wrote titled "Juke Box." The two lead characters were a married couple. Danny Glover played the African American husband, Miyamoto the Japanese American wife.

Their love followed Kirkland’s script, and they were married that same year. A Buddhist minister conducted one ceremony, a Christian minister a second. And for their own private ceremony, they did t’ai chi.

Three years ago, Miyamoto’s son, Kamuau, now 22, became a Muslim. Three faiths, one family. In many ways, they are what L.A. could be.

"My mom always told me to hang on to spirituality," Kamau says. "It’s in every person regardless of what they look like. There’s light in everyone. That’s your reference point. The first thing you look for isn’t what they look like physically it’s what they look like spiritually. I see myself as holding onto that rope. That’s what makes me alive."

His mother’s light is bright, he says. "It shoots out from her eyes. She’s like a star, not a Hollywood star, a real star, in the sky."

Spirituality has been at the center of Miyamoto’s life since she returned from New York in the early 1970s. It was the Rev. Masao Kodani at the Senshin Buddhist Temple near USC who opened the doors of the temple’s community center to her to teach dance. The temple became her dojo, a place to learn the way, and after eight years of teaching classes there, she created Great Leap.

From t’ai chi, she has learned an important lesson, expanding on all that she learned from her mother, from the movement and from the sacred places that music and dance have taken her.

"Your movements flow, and if somebody pushes you, you deflect, you don’t fight against it. You let it go, then you find your moment to push."

With "To All Relations," Miyamoto, 56, has found a moment to push, to feel the earth beneath her, the sun on her back. She calls her dreams a place of voices, some of them soft, just beyond reach. She hears her mother’s voice and her silence, her father’s music.

She hears chanting in the streets, wind and rivers, echoes of gunshots and sirens, the screams of children in Brazil. And within those voices, she searches for her song.