Brent Roman: A Western Musician with A Chinese Soul

“If I could be reincarnated to a time, it would be the Tang Dynasty,” said Brent Roman, sitting across the table in his Chinese-style linen shirt the color of faded crimson. He cleared the table for the waiter who served him a French croissant and a cup of cappuccino, and nodded lightly with an adept “merci beaucoup.” Then he looked up to me.“Amazing time; so much openness there.”

The Tang dynasty, covering 618 AD to 917 AD, was generally regarded as a glistening period in Chinese civilization and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture, thanks to the prosperous Ancient Silk Road and an inclusive state of mind.

White, tall and with a shaved head, Brent looks Western European, the wrapping for his Chinese soul. The first time I met him at Navy Pier, he was wearing a white Chinese shirt, playing traditional Chinese musical instruments with his students and he introduced some of the pieces in fluent Chinese.

But he was tricked into Chinese music when he was studying world music at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, he says jokingly.

Walking outside his university practice room, he peeked into a room where he saw some “amazing” musical instruments he had never seen before. Then a little Chinese man came to greet him, asking him what he was doing outside the window. Brent said he was a percussion student, curious whether the instrument in the corner of the room was a hammered dulcimer, as he was familiar with the Irish and American counterparts. The man asked him to wait for a second, returned with a piece of paper and told him to give it to the attendance office.

The lady at the attendance office took the paper and started to type on her computer. Brent had no idea what was happening until the lady looked up from her screen and told him he was all set.

“All set for what?”

“You have signed up for the Chinese music ensemble.”

Either a mischievous trick or serendipity, Brent was led in the door of the Chinese music studio by Professor Kuo-Huang Han, the little Chinese man who handed him the invitation. With him he started studying playing Yangqin, the Chinese hammered dulcimer he saw when peeking through the window. And he learned to play Luogu, traditional Chinese percussion.

In 2000, after receiving a university grant and a grant from the Freeman Asia Foundation, Brent traveled to China to study traditional Chinese music at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. He spent one year learning Mandarin before going to Beijing and found that was totally insufficient.

“Even though Beijing was a big city in 2000, there weren’t a lot of foreigners,” he said. “People would stare at me at the street. And everyone knew ‘hullo,’ always hullo hullo hullo. That’s it. I mean...” Brent took a long pause, sipping his coffee, as if looking for a euphemistic way to express his feelings at the time.“I felt not 100 percent welcomed.”

“You know an onion, right?” Brent asked. He said communicating with people back in Beijing in 2000 was like peeling off layers and layers of cultural barriers. “I always think there’s one more layer that leads to a core being: ‘you are not one of us. You’ll never be part of the club.’ That was the struggle for me in Beijing.”

But the perk of being a musician is that they can communicate through another universal language. He learned techniques of Yangqin and came to a deep understanding of the aesthetics, history and philosophy of Chinese percussion.

In later years when he visited Taiwan, Brent studied Guqin, a Chinese zither that he claims is the most difficult musical instrument in the world that he has studied. Years spent within the cultural environment, as well as the earth-shaking changes China itself has gone through over the past decades, have helped Brent peel down layers and layers of that “onion.”

In 2008, Brent was touring with Cirque du Soleil for a show called “Dralion”, a title coined as a combination of ‘dragon’ and ‘lion,’ symbolizing the fusion of the East and the West. There were several Chinese acrobats in the troupe with whom Brent got the chance to learn and improve his Mandarin. During a tour break, Brent visited Lijiang, an ancient town in Yunnan Province and was transfixed.

“I almost bought a place there,” said Brent. “You see the sky, the mountains, the terra cotta roofs while walking down the streets. It’s fantastic... I loved it there,” he said.

“And also, I found that in Lijiang, I was treated [more] just like a person and less as a foreigner.”

It was also in Lijiang that Brent bought his first hulusi, a Chinese flute. Though a percussionist at heart, he managed to teach himself to play it within one or two weeks and performed at a gig in the style of Dai people, an ethnic minority in southwestern China.

“Chinese music is only one part of what he does,” said Cheryl Roman, Brent’s mother. “He does Mucca Pazza [Circus-punk-funk-gypsy marching band]. He’s taught Chinese Luogu in college. Also in college, he was in a steelpan band, steelpan from Trinidad and Tobago. When they [the band] went to the International Steelpan Competition, he did this solo on Djembe, which is an African drum, and they took second in the world. He plays Indian tabla. He just does it all.” One can sense the pride of a mother when Cheryl counted each and every exotic musical instrument her son plays.

Thanks to his hippie parents, he grew up in an inclusive and liberal family environment that exposed him in a variety of cultures and encouraged him to pursue what interested him, Brent said. They lived in the western suburbs of Chicago in the early 1980s and often found themselves the only Caucasians in the Di-Ho, a nearby Chinese shopping center which they visited every weekend.

“Brent was exposed to Chinese culture, Chinese music and Chinese toys at very early age,” said Cheryl, who also believes she is the reincarnation of someone who has spent several lifetimes in China. “He was like six months old and his favorite thing is hot and sour soup. You couldn’t fill him up. He just loved it.”

Cheryl’s fervent interest in Chinese culture is hard to hide as her whole house was filled with Chinese furniture, calligraphy, paintings - just like a museum. The black lacquer with enamel, a 4-foot-square coffee table and a bar as well as bedroom furniture are all Chinese. Last time Cheryl’s granddaughter visited, the little girl counted 143 Buddhas in the house. Well, that’s where Brent unconsciously absorbed the influence. But it was not confined to Chinese culture.

“Every Sunday we listened to two radio shows of ‘Prairie Home Companion’ and ‘Afropop Worldwide.’ I was exposed to a lot of music and a lot of cultures. My mom was a great cook and she’s always interested in learning different cuisines,” Brent said.

But why music? “

As a child, he just bounced off the wall,” Cheryl recalled. “He was the messiest kid. You could walk into a classroom and immediately tell where he was, because he would just have this ring of stuff around his desk.

So music miraculously yet naturally became a remedy for Brent. As early as elementary school, Brent found that playing music gave him a focus and peace.

“He was able to take all his energy, put it into music, and channeled it,” said Cheryl. “All the energy on one side would come off in music on another side.”

After that summer in Beijing, Brent returned to Chicago and found a job in teaching Chinese music to Chinese people. The Cheng Da Drum Team, an amateur music ensemble based in Chicago suburbs, organized by the Alumni Association of Cheng Gong University from Taiwan, is an ensemble that Brent has been directing ever since.

“It was hard to find anyone who could teach Chinese music back in 2000, and it is still the same now,” said Sharon Kao, the leader of the drum team. “But Brent has been a good teacher over the years, very strict and very earnest.”

The chemistry was a little bit weird between the young western teacher and the Taiwanese students, some of whom had sons and daughters older than him.

“It’s all upside down,” Brent said. “In traditional Chinese society, the teacher is like the highest role. But age is also very important.”

Before and after the lesson started, the students would ask the teacher about whether he was dating a new girl, what happened to the previous one and how things were going with his job hunting. Once the lesson began, however, it totally turned into a traditional Chinese class where the teacher became the absolute authority.

“We admired Brent for his knowledge in Chinese music. He taught us about the eight tones of ancient Chinese music, how the bells sounded, the history and the philosophy. He knows so much,” said Nancy Wu, a student in her 60s who started learning with Brent two years ago.

“He’s very talented. Many of the music we performed are his creations,” said Stephanie Marsh, another student in her 50s from Taiwan. “The first time I heard his piece called ‘Confession’, I was almost moved to tears. It was so beautiful,” Nancy Wu echoed.

They performed together during Chinese traditional festivals. When Brent’s birthday run into the date of the lesson, the students would bring home-made cakes for their teacher. Over the years, the drum team and its teacher both have matured.

“I was a starving college student when I first started with them, single, poor and hungry, in a sense of trying to make your way,” recalled Brent, now married, with a house and a stable life.

He started America's first Chinese high school music ensemble at New Trier High School in Winnetka and teaches there currently. In his spare time, he hosts all kinds of music workshops and creates music for commissions. As a recording artist, Brent has played on nine published albums and has made recordings for various bands, choirs, and theatre companies in the Chicagoland area. His works include a special holiday choir album for Kellogg’s, as well as an album for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.

“The most important thing is that I don’t get bored,” Brent said. “I think a lot of people are in jobs that don’t give them the challenge, or pleasure, or creativity, or room to grow up. And I have all four of those things with the job that I have now.”

Sometimes just for a second, he thought of the days when he could answer a call and hop on a plane that travels half a world away for touring performances. Now, his life is steady, abundant and happy.

Brent recalled the tour with Cirque du Soleil in Sydney, Australia. There was a Chinese garden in the Chinatown that lies on the route from his hotel to the performance site. He preferred walking through the Chinatown for 45 minutes to taking the buses.

“I would walk through the gardens, feed the fish, take a cup of cappuccino and sit for a while. Very peaceful. I like that kind of life,” Brent said. He also has a Chinese name, Yi Qing, which means exactly the status of that kind of life.