By Mark Swed

"(M)iyamoto Is Black Enough" featured, from left, drummer Sean Dixon, steel pan player Andy Akiho, poet Roger Bonair-Agard and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler at the Wallis on Thursday night. (Lawrence K. Ho / The Wallis)

Well, that was a surprise!

“(M)iyamoto Is Black Enough” — the first in what will be an ongoing collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and Brooklyn’s newest and presumably hippest major new music site, National Sawdust — was described in advance materials as well as the program booklet as “a riveting piece about Ariana Miyamoto, the mixed-race winner of Miss Universe Japan 2015.” They got one thing right: It was, indeed, riveting.

But the performance had next to nothing (make that nothing) to do with the Japanese and African American beauty queen or her having to weather “backlash for her lack of ‘pure’ parentage,” which is to say for not having been Japanese enough. In fact, “(M)iyamoto Is Black Enough” turns out to be the name of a band or new music group or something. Not being genre-specific, the foursome can’t yet quite figure out what to otherwise call themselves. They haven’t even managed to come up with names for the pieces they play.

The trailblazing members are poet Roger Bonair-Agard, steelpan player and composer Andy Akiho, jazz and pop drummer Sean Dixon and former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler. They started working together in 2015 when Miss Universe was in the news, and because Akiho and Zeigler are half Japanese, “(M)iyamoto” resonated. As for the parentheses, you’ll have to ask them, not that they’re very good at coming up with answers.

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