Yano’s Dog a beautiful ode to family memories

By Yasmine Shemesh

Jonah Yano remembers the first time he ever ate ikura. The juicy salmon roe was served on tofu, sprinkled with bonito flakes. His grandparents always had it on hand, preserved in brine and stored in the basement of their Port Coquitlam home. That meal is one of Yano’s fondest memories of his grandfather.

“I felt like he was sharing something about our identity with me,” the musician says with a smile, speaking over Zoom. “In retrospect, that’s what it felt like. When I was a kid, I was just eating something yummy.”

His grandfather is a first-generation Japanese Canadian.

“But I can remember the plate and everything,” Yano recalls.

Food has a kind of multi-sensory power. It can embody love. It can hold memory, ushering you right back to an exact moment. “I feel like it can also connect you to parts of yourself you’ve never known before,” Yano says.

About three years ago, when his grandfather began losing his memory, Yano travelled back to Port Coquitlam to archive his family’s life. The musician now lives in Montreal, but he was born in Hiroshima, Japan, and raised in the Tri-Cities. For his trip home, Yano brought a field recorder, a video camera, disposable cameras, and a scanner to individually scan documents and thousands of photos. He was there for two weeks. It was painstaking and tireless, but incredibly important.

“As time goes on, you forget stuff, and as people pass away, the things that pass away with them are gone,” Yano says. “I wanted to just have those conversations and record them, so that I have them forever.”

While Yano knew in some way that the cataloging would be part of his next album, he didn’t realize just how much it would be the glue that held everything together. Once he was in the middle of sifting through everything, it was clear he needed to process it through music.

An intimate contemplation and celebration of family history, dynamics, and relationships materialized on Yano’s new album, Portrait of a Dog. While the writing was years in the making, recording the music—a rhythmic and expansive landscape of jazz, acoustic, and experimental textures, produced entirely in collaboration with alternative jazz band BADBADNOTGOOD—took just eight days.

Rich string arrangements that Yano worked out in his apartment with his friend and “brilliant cellist” Eliza Niemi contribute. They are particularly moving in support of the voices of Yano’s family members, taken directly from recorded conversations, which surface through songs like “Haven’t Haven’t,” where his grandfather forgets his name.

Warm laughter rushes in as the strings retreat out. “Who’s that?” Yano’s grandmother asks. The musician is in the background, encouraging his grandfather, reminding him. Saxophone builds. “Jonah!” Laughter again, and the horn ripples into a bright solo.

“When he gets to it, we all laugh because, you know—ultimately it’s quite a sad thing that has just happened there.” Laughter is another instrument—one of healing—that faithfully accompanies the family voices on the album.

“It’s because they’re so funny. They’re such funny people,” Yano explains with a grin. “I was trying to do my best to communicate that through the recordings I use.”

Yano’s own voice—which shifts from aching and restrained to full and robust, sometimes flooding right into the waves of sound—is the emotional compass of Portrait of a Dog. His vocals take centre stage on “Song About the Family House,” the one track on the record that is just Yano, by himself, with his acoustic guitar. “So bury me on Jefferson Street/Replace me with concrete,” he sings softly. “And all of the stories I’ll keep/Between family/It’s just me.”

Developers have been buying up much of the neighbourhood where Yano’s family lives. When he found out his home was on the line too, he felt stricken. Its existence would be forgotten. Everyone has lived there at some point: his grandparents, his mother, even him. His aunt and uncle live there now.

“To this day, everyone still gathers there for dinner, and celebrates things and each other,” Yano says. “It’s the arena of family life—like the coliseum of generational information. It just felt important to make something for it and about it.”

As Yano named the album’s songs, he was reading The Undying, Anne Boyer’s memoir about breast cancer. A line stood out: “the ordinary is ordinary because it ordinarily repeats.”

“I thought, ‘Wow. That is one of the most beautiful ways to describe what the lived experience is all about,’” Yano says. “And it becomes the last phrase of the album.”

His grandparents haven’t heard Portrait of a Dog in its entirety yet. Yano will send them a CD, and he’s excited for when they receive it.

“My grandma will really love it. I really don’t even know if my grandfather will care, you know?” Yano laughs.

He smiles fondly. “But I know he’s proud of it and proud of me.” GS