grandfather's journey video

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History Resources

"Grandfather's Journey"

By allen say (author and illustrator).

When he was a young man, Allen Say’s grandfather left his home in Japan to explore the world. He began his journey by crossing the Pacific Ocean on a steamship, then wandered the deserts, farmlands, and cities of North America. Allen Say lovingly tells the story of his own family’s cross-cultural history in elegant watercolor paintings that earned him a Caldecott Medal in 1994.

Read by Kendyl Yokoyama , who is in the Ensemble in the North American Tour of Hamilton

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Grandfather’s Journey

Grandfather's Journey: Read Aloud Video

Grandfather's Journey: Word Search

Grandfather's journey: interview with allen say.

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GRANDFATHER'S JOURNEY

by Allen Say & illustrated by Allen Say ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1993

Lovely, quiet—with a tenderness and warmth new to this fine illustrator's work.

"The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other," observes Say near the end of this poignant account of three generations of his family's moves between Japan and the US.

Say's grandfather came here as a young man, married, and lived in San Francisco until his daughter was "nearly grown" before returning to Japan; his treasured plan to visit the US once again was delayed, forever as it turned out, by WW II. Say's American-born mother married in Japan (cf. Tree of Cranes, 1991), while he, born in Yokohama, came here at 16. In lucid, graceful language, he chronicles these passages, reflecting his love of both countries—plus the expatriate's ever-present longing for home—in both simple text and exquisitely composed watercolors: scenes of his grandfather discovering his new country and returning with new appreciation to the old, and pensive portraits recalling family photos, including two evoking the war and its aftermath.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-395-57035-2

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993

CHILDREN'S FAMILY

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More by Allen Say

BOOK REVIEW

by Allen Say ; illustrated by Allen Say

WRECKING BALL

From the diary of a wimpy kid series , vol. 14.

by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019

Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.

The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.

When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Amulet/Abrams

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | CHILDREN'S FAMILY

More In The Series

by Jeff Kinney ; illustrated by Jeff Kinney

More by Jeff Kinney

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

NOWHERE BOY

by Katherine Marsh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2018

A captivating book situated in present-day discourse around the refugee crisis, featuring two boys who stand by their high...

Two parallel stories, one of a Syrian boy from Aleppo fleeing war, and another of a white American boy, son of a NATO contractor, dealing with the challenges of growing up, intersect at a house in Brussels.

Ahmed lost his father while crossing the Mediterranean. Alone and broke in Europe, he takes things into his own hands to get to safety but ends up having to hide in the basement of a residential house. After months of hiding, he is discovered by Max, a boy of similar age and parallel high integrity and courage, who is experiencing his own set of troubles learning a new language, moving to a new country, and being teased at school. In an unexpected turn of events, the two boys and their new friends Farah, a Muslim Belgian girl, and Oscar, a white Belgian boy, successfully scheme for Ahmed to go to school while he remains in hiding the rest of the time. What is at stake for Ahmed is immense, and so is the risk to everyone involved. Marsh invites art and history to motivate her protagonists, drawing parallels to gentiles who protected Jews fleeing Nazi terror and citing present-day political news. This well-crafted and suspenseful novel touches on the topics of refugees and immigrant integration, terrorism, Islam, Islamophobia, and the Syrian war with sensitivity and grace.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-30757-6

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY

More by Katherine Marsh

by Katherine Marsh

by Katherine Marsh ; illustrated by Kelly Murphy

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Grandfather’s Journey

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Lyrical, breathtaking, splendid—words used to describe Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey when it was first published. At once deeply personal yet expressing universally held emotions, this tale of one man’s love for two countries and his constant desire to be in both places captured readers’ attention and hearts.

Lyrical, breathtaking, splendid—words used to describe Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey when it was first published.

At once deeply personal yet expressing universally held emotions, this tale of one man’s love for two countries and his constant desire to be in both places captured readers’ attention and hearts.

Winner of the 1994 Caldecott Medal, it remains as historically relevant and emotionally engaging as ever.

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Classroom in the Middle

Language arts activities for middle school and upper elementary..

Introducing an Immigration-Themed Reading Unit with Grandfather’s Journey

As I’ve mentioned before, using a great picture book is one of my favorite activities for introducing a new reading unit.  Short and sweet, with lots of engaging pictures, it’s a sure way to get kids interested in the theme and a quick way to introduce a reading skill or two that you plan to incorporate into the unit.

For a reading unit with a theme of immigration, I’ve chosen the picture book Grandfather’s Journey  by Allen Say.  It’s the story of a young man who comes to love both his new country and his home country and to appreciate the experiences of his grandfather who made a similar journey years before.

Through a tale about the lifetime journey of his grandfather, the narrator, and the readers, learn an appreciation for many things in each country – Japan and the United States, and we see how the immigrant experience is really a lifetime experience, or even longer as in this four-generation story that begins with the narrator’s grandfather and ends after the narrator has a daughter of his own.

This tale of two cultures focuses on beautiful things and positive ideas about both Japan and the United States that students can expand on with research or more stories as the reading unit progresses.  For example, the grandfather spent a long time exploring parts of North America where he was impressed by the great variety of landscapes that he saw – deserts, fields of wheat, mountains, and industrial cities.  Students could follow-up with a mini-research project to find images, facts, and descriptive language about these different regions of the country.

Later in his life, on a return visit to Japan, grandfather enjoyed visiting the countryside and the small village that he remembered, but his daughter, a modern young woman, felt more at home in a big Japanese city.  American students might have an image of Japan that is mainly one or the other, all simple and rural or all crowded cities.  It might be interesting for them to learn more about the setting that they are less familiar with.

Grandfather’s Journey is also a good book for introducing the story element of setting: it is set in two very different locations, takes place in an interesting period in history that many students will be studying in history class, and has a duration of four generations, long enough for talking about the changes that might have happened over the years but short enough for kids to make sense of.

Interesting discussion questions might include:

• How would you compare the narrator to his grandfather?  What are some similarities?  Differences?
• How would you compare Grandfather’s journey to the journey of immigrants that you know or have heard of recently?
• Why might people from one culture at first mistrust people from another culture that they know very little about?
• How could learning about something as simple as the everyday life of someone in a village or a city in another part of the world contribute to better understanding between cultures?
• What else have you read with a theme of immigration?
• What other country would you most like to visit?  What part of the United States?

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Grandfather's journey

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Grandfather's Journey teaches Connecting Generations

Additional value:.

Book Summary:

Topic(s) addressed:, enduring understandings:.

• L’dor v’do r means knowing the history of our people and learning from the history of our own families and communities. 
• Our “home” can be defined in many ways, meaning different things to different people, and sometimes a person might have more than one. It might refer to the place in which the family lives, the country where they live, the synagogue in which they worship, etc.

Essential Questions:

• What causes people to leave their countries and their homes? 
• What makes a place a home? 
• What does it mean to go on a journey?

Be Inspired: The ideas included are offered as starting points as you and your students explore, discover and live the lessons. Be sure to elicit and encourage student and parent participation, consistently reinforcing the value being addressed. Allow lessons to authentically develop and change based on engagement and interests.

Lesson plan components, for the educator jewish thought, text, and traditions more.

The value of l’dor v’dor – from generation to generation –connects our history with that of the past and the future. Judaism places great importance on the transference of memory so that it may always be for a blessing. When we remember that which came before us, and embrace the knowledge gained from those who came before us, all of our stories become as one. L’dor v’dor means for us to recall the struggles of our ancestors; to remember Egypt, to remember the fall of the Second Temple, to remember the expulsion from Spain, and even remember the Holocaust. Jewish identity is founded in this history and links us to those who are also in covenant with G-d and those who share this history. L’dor v’dor not only means knowing the history of our people and learning from that history, but also learning about and learning from the history of our own families and communities. It is our family that provides the foundations for the lessons we learn. However, it is the responsibility of the entire community to bring up the next generation. We connect with our Judaism from the actions of others – our parents, our teachers, from all members of the community. We take this knowledge and wisdom accumulated over the centuries and apply it to our lives today. L’dor V’dor is not just about embracing the past, but uplifting the past’s relevance in our own time and place.

• What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want to pass on to those whom you love? 
• As a teacher, what is one thing you want to pass on to your students? 
• In what ways can we encourage students and families to explore the legacy of the generations that came before them: the ways they faced challenges, connections they still have to countries left behind, and how their lives enriched the live of each generation that came after? 
• How can the value of L’dor v’dor be incorporated within the classroom?

Jewish every day Incorporate Jewish Values more

Materials and resources more.

Copy Of Grandfather’s Journey

Read Aloud of Story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfhJstC43Y Neil Diamond singing “America”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLrQS5q2E8

Sharing The Story more

• What do you think this song is about? 
• What brought people to America? 
• Do you recognize the last few lines of the song? They are from “My Country ’tis of Thee.”
• Ask students to explain what the term “journey” means. Ask,“Have you ever traveled to a distant city or country?” Have them share a journey they have taken. Locate these cities or countries on a map. 
• What do students believe the book might be about? 
• Encourage students to look at the person in the illustration and his clothing. Who might he be? Where was the picture taken? Where is he going? 
• Explain the terms “immigrant” and “immigration” and the fact that Grandfather’s Journey is about the author’s grandfather who “immigrated” to America from Japan. 
• On a map, point out where Japan is located as well as San Francisco, where Grandfather ultimately lived. Have them suggest what routes Grandfather may have taken from Japan to America’s West Coast traveling by ship. 
• Grandfather explored North America and visited many different areas. Can students identify where he might have been when he saw the “rocks like enormous sculptures,” the “endless farm fields,” “huge cities of factories and tall buildings,” or the “towering mountains and rivers”? 
• Why did Grandfather leave America and return to the place of his birth (Japan) 
• If you were to leave your home, what things about your city,state, or country would you miss most?
• As appropriate, an extension of this discussion might be discovering a way that appreciation for a person, place or thing that would be missed could be expressed.
• Allen Say, the author of the book, decided to live in America, yet he returns to visit Japan when he can. At the end of the book he wrote, “The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.” 
• What do you think “homesick” means? Why might a person become “homesick”?
• Ask students to think of the places in their life that feel like home. 
• What attributes of a place are necessary to make them feel that way?
• Do they have multiple places that feel like home (be sure to be sensitive and supportive to the needs of children who might have atypical home living situations)
• How can being with your family make a place feel like home?

Procedure more

Explore, discover, and more extension and reinforcement activities more.

G-d Bless America The Jews who immigrated to America became strong supporters of their new homeland and the freedoms it allowed. Some of the most popular American songs were written by Jewish immigrants. “G-d Bless America,” for example, was written by Irving Berlin, who was born in 1888 in Eastern Russia. His father, a cantor, brought the family to America and settled in New York City in 1893. With the help of your school’s music teacher or a video like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhyIUDgIwz4 , teach students Berlin’s song-his prayer for America. G-d Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Through the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam G-d bless America, My home sweet home. Patriotic Collage: Using magazines such as National Geographic, have students cut out pictures of places in the United States that include the types of geographic features that Grandfather saw. Have them create collages that reflect “America the Beautiful.” Use the internet to locate these geographical areas in United States. An American Tail Have students watch An American Tail. Originally released in 1986, this animated film produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment is the story of Fievel, a young Russian mouse whose family decided to move to America, a land “without cats.” During the voyage, Fievel is swept out to sea but fortunately survives and washes up in New York Harbor. Alone in a new country, Fieval sets off on a journey to find his family. Along the way, he must deal with many challenges, including the loneliness of being away from home. As you and your students watch this film, discuss how the film reflects some of the reasons for immigration and problems immigrants face. This film is rated “G.”

Music Connections more

Many Jewish families have a connection to Israel, either through experience living there, family or friends who live there, or by virtue of the fact that it is a Jewish country. The national Anthem, “Hatikvah,“ has been performed in many different ways with different cultural influences. Play the Israeli National Anthem “Hatikvah.” Explore different versions of the song, each influenced by different cultural elements: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtZ59vn6nOc3ujguZPyVX2vwflU5pmJY- Talk about the importance of Israel, the Jewish Homeland, to the Jewish people in Israel, America, and throughout the world.

Evidence of Learning more

Students are able to describe their personal family history regarding the countries where previous generations have lived.

HOME AND COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS more

• When did you immigrate to America?
• What made you/your family decide to come to America?
• What did you bring with you?
• What were some of the first things you saw?
• What was the most difficult thing for you when you first came to America?
• What do you miss about your homeland?
• What do you appreciate most about this country?

literature connections more

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• 1:  Remember!

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• 15: L'chadaysh Et Ha'yashan (Renew The Old) by Jay Rapoport
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• 3: Life Cycle Events
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Lesson Plans

• 1: Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge teaches to Honor Senior Citizens Connect Generations and Remember!
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• 2: Have Courage
• 3: Learn from Everyone
• 4: Study Torah
• 5: Connect Generations
• 6: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
• 7: Love of (the People and land of) Israel
• 8: Honor Humanity
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Family remembers 8-year-old girl, grandfather killed in crash: ‘They’re together forever’

CANAL WINCHESTER, Ohio (WSYX) – An Ohio woman is now without her young daughter and father after the two were killed in a crash.

Eight-year-old Iyoki Robinson and her 63-year-old grandfather, Wayne Smith, were killed last week in a car crash in Canal Winchester.

“They’re together forever,” Iyoki’s mother and Smith’s daughter could be heard saying at a recent balloon release honoring the two.

The girl and her grandfather were described as an inseparable pair.

“Everywhere he was, she was right there with them,” Ella White, Smith’s sister-in-law, said.

Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers said another driver blew through a stop sign and struck Smith’s car with Iyoki and his wife inside.

“I was at work when I got the call from mom,” Iyoki’s aunt, Brittany Wade, said. “It really brought me to my knees. I really didn’t even understand at first. I had to put it in thought and go, ‘OK, this can’t be it.’”

As the pain of reality sinks in, Iyoki’s aunt says they’re leaning on each other.

“To lose, like I said, a child, to lose a father in the same moment, is just something you don’t want to wish on anyone,” Wade added.

Wade said they’ll always remember Iyoki’s smile and energy.

“She’s a beautiful bright light in our world and she’ll always be that, just being a young kid,” Wade remembered. “She was just getting into softball, getting her mitt and ball, and stuff like that. She had just gotten a new bat and gloves literally on Sunday, on Easter Sunday.”

While she can’t play here with them, Iyoki’s grandfather’s sister finds comfort in knowing the two are together.

“They were inseparable, those two,” White said. “So, when this happened, the only thing I could think of was maybe they couldn’t be here without each other. So, that’s probably why.”

Smith’s wife survived the crash but remains hospitalized.

The family launched a GoFundMe to help with expenses.

Copyright 2024 WSYX via CNN Newsource. All rights reserved.

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That such music has come to have a real toehold on the culture says as much about the way music is listened to today as the sound itself. Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.

Fortunately, being the three musicians who popularized a sound that so many others are chasing is not the same thing as chasing that sound yourself. To the members of Khruangbin — pronounced krung-bin, and featuring Laura Lee Ochoa on bass, Donald Johnson on drums and Mark Speer on guitar — that sound is not so much a goal as a result: It is what happens when they play music together. And while many others have tried, and are still trying, to identify and replicate what is so particular about Khruangbin’s sound, this is not really possible, because what happens among people when they play music together cannot really be quantified. Often, when it works, it is more — well, it’s more vibey than that.

Steve Christensen, Khruangbin’s longtime producer, explained it to me like this: Just about every day, he gets hit up on Instagram by folks asking how to achieve a particular Khruangbin sound. He responds, keeping no secrets, readily giving away everything, because Ochoa, Johnson and Speer have used pretty much the exact same setup for well over a decade now. Their gear and their instruments are simple and straightforward to the point of being borderline ascetic. (Ochoa, for example, has not changed the strings on her bass since 2010, when the group first formed.) When people write back to Christensen, which they often do, they will tell him that they now have all the same gear, and have learned all the songs perfectly, and still cannot get quite the same sound. “Well, I’m sorry,” he tells them, “but that’s just how they play.” Someone might copy Speer’s rig down to the last knob setting, and play his guitar melodies note for note, but without Ochoa and Johnson playing, too, the Khruangbin sound cannot be duplicated. “I know it sounds so simple,” Christensen says, “but if they’re not playing as a trio, it just doesn’t sound like KB.”

Questlove — the producer, documentary filmmaker, author and longtime bandleader of the Roots — is someone who has thought quite a bit about this quality in music, the ineffable alchemy that can occur when certain musicians join together. When he first saw Khruangbin, he was grabbed by not just the way they played, but also by their extreme level of togetherness. “They are so well gelled,” is how he described it. This quality, he went on, was a very rare thing, particularly in a trio. “Think of the Police,” he said. “Like, it’s so hard to do that. Musically speaking, you have to check your ego at the door and just trust that someone completely gets you.” And the Police were plagued enough by bickering to disband after about eight years — Khruangbin has, so far, been together for about 14.

After he first saw Khruangbin perform, Questlove reached out to the group. He was enamored with their sound, he told me, and wanted to find a way to help them preserve it. “They have magic — I don’t want them to ever lose that. You know what I mean?” I had to admit that, while I sort of understood, I had also never been a member of a wildly popular band: How did one lose the magic? That was easy, Questlove said: By not checking your ego. By having “one person stand like, ‘Oh, look at me, look at me.’” This was especially difficult to avoid, he said, because musicianship, like so much else these days, was increasingly focused on the individual. So how did Khruangbin gel so well, and stay well gelled?

Speer and Johnson first met in 2004, when the Houston keyboard hero Cleo Sample, who has toured with D’Angelo, pointed Speer out to Johnson, saying, “That white boy, he’s amazing.” Both musicians were gigging heavily in Houston: Johnson played in funk and jazz combos when he wasn’t playing organ in church, while Speer played with just about anyone, from ska, hip-hop and rockabilly to zydeco and R.&B. He was, Johnson says, “like a Swiss Army utility knife that can do it all.” Speer often felt as if he were the only guy in town moving among all these different scenes, and he took pride in trying to make musical connections among them. He played guitar with Solange Knowles, back when she was performing as Solo Star, and remembers asking: “Solo, have you listened to the Flaming Lips?”

Around 2006, Speer and Johnson began playing together at St. John’s Downtown Church. Its pastor at the time was Rudy Rasmus, whose love of jazz and exacting ear had long made the place a sort of Everest for local musicians. (Beyoncé grew up singing there.) Johnson put it to me simply: “Rudy knew if you sucked,” and if you sucked, you didn’t get hired. Johnson grew up with gospel, but Speer was also a wonder at it; it is, Johnson says, a type of music that is all-encompassing, containing many genres at once. It also requires a kind of egoless playing: You have to be listening intensely to the other musicians, and to on-the-fly changes from the musical director, who is locked in on the pastor, who is responding to the congregation.

After rehearsal, on Tuesday nights, the two of them would get tacos and beers at a nearby bar. One bartender had an iPod with a lot of good, obscure music from around the world — all of which Speer seemed to know about already, tracing scales and techniques from one continent to another. “He’s like a music encyclopedia,” Johnson says. In fact, Speer told me that one of the most formative musical moments in his life came when he discovered a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM included with his parents’ new Compaq and became obsessed with its huge catalog of 30-second music samples from all corners of the globe.

One of Speer’s friends — Ochoa — eventually joined the Tuesday-night drinks. She was not a musician; she was studying art history, and would later teach math to third graders. Soon after meeting Speer, she noticed him playing his guitar along to any song that came on the radio. One day she asked him: “How do you do that?” He told her it was just a matter of following the bass, which led her to try playing one herself. “It was the first time an instrument just felt easy,” she says. Speer didn’t so much teach as guide her: “He would hear me playing, and would come over every so often, and be like, ‘Is that where that note ends?’”

Years passed, and Speer asked her to join him on a short tour, backing the electronic artist Yppah, who was opening for the British D.J. and producer Bonobo. It wasn’t just playing onstage that gave Ochoa the confidence to think about starting a band of her own; it was backstage, watching Bonobo’s camp, where she saw what music-making required “from, like, a go-getter organizational-producer-type place.” Everything around the music suddenly snapped into focus. “I love spreadsheets,” she explains — and seeing firsthand that musical success also required those skills “made being in a band feel like an attainable goal.”

She and Speer had been playing together in an old barn Speer’s family had in Burton, about 90 minutes’ drive west of Houston, in the wide-open hill country. Now she asked Johnson to join them, to start their own project. His ultratight, nearly metronomic hip-hop drumming was an ideal thread for Ochoa’s mellow, melodic bass to fold itself around — all while Speer’s guitar sang its gorgeous, worldly melodies over the top.

The magic, Ochoa says, was there from the jump. But she also knew, even after a few gigs around Houston, that they needed to get out onto the road to really grow. To do that, they needed recordings. Out at the barn, over 18 hours or so, they cut about 14 tracks. One of them, “A Calf Born in Winter,” begins with the distant sound of jingling bells — maybe sleigh bells, maybe something like the bells from Javanese gamelan music — followed by a pretty little line from what sounds like some kind of zither. Then Speer and Ochoa and Johnson make their musical entrance. The song has no chorus, no hook, no bridge, no vocals; it meanders along its own absorbing path.

Ochoa eventually got the track into the hands of Bonobo, who used it on his 2013 contribution to “LateNightTales,” a beloved series of mixtapes built on nocturnal moods. While Bonobo’s mix included far better-known artists, like Nina Simone and Bill Evans, the Khruangbin track was the standout. Here was a band no one had heard of, with an exotic name — Thai for “engine fly” or, less literally, “airplane” — and a sound that felt timeless and impossible to place. With seemingly no other tracks by them available anywhere else, it was easy to imagine the recording might have come from some long-forgotten 1970s Thai psychedelic-rock outfit, the kind of crate-digger find so popular among music nerds. That it turned out to be a trio from Houston only made them more intriguing.

Over the next two years, more tracks from that initial barn session trickled out; the three toured and toured as their audience grew and grew. They put out a full album, and another, and another, and a very good disc of dub remixes. They sold out Red Rocks in Colorado, the Greek theaters in Berkeley and Los Angeles and two nights at Radio City Music Hall. They made two EPs with a fellow Texan, Leon Bridges, one of which, “Texas Sun,” made it to the top of Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart; there was also an album with Vieux Farka Touré, son of the Malian guitar god Ali Farka Touré. They recently remixed the Paul McCartney song “Pretty Boys” after he tapped them for his “McCartney III Reimagined” project. What is most noticeable, listening to their collaborations, is that the essential Khruangbin-ness of their sound is impossible to dispel — even their more famous collaborators get gathered into the band’s sonic world.

That is what has led the trio to dominate this niche in the streaming environment, as the flagship purveyor of alluring, mood-setting music that will mellow out the air in your home or boutique or TikTok video. Unlike with so many forgettable imitators, their particularities somehow refuse to stay in the background; they draw in and hold your attention. To date, Khruangbin’s albums have passed 775 million streams, a large number that still does not capture their weirdly broad appeal. Their frequent festival shows come closer: The audience for those tends to be a remarkable cross section of scenes, the E.D.M. kids and hip-hop heads rubbing shoulders with the psych-rock freaks. If the algorithms have a habit of slipping Khruangbin tracks into everyone’s ears, it’s surely because that works — they beguile across tastes.

The three of them like to joke that if they had any sense of how big they would one day be, they would have picked a name that was easier to pronounce. But even the name has added to the band’s intrigue and iconography. Same goes for the wigs Speer and Ochoa have always worn when photographed or onstage — a spur-of-the-moment choice by Ochoa, right before Khruangbin’s very first show. “I’ll be honest: It was the look and the name that grabbed me first,” David Byrne said in an email. He’d recently gone with Ochoa to see the singer-songwriter Mitski perform, and was struck by how anonymous Ochoa was when out in the world wig-free. He, like Questlove, was a big Khruangbin fan, and thought of the band as existing within a genre he called “instrumental pop,” which he then defined with a glorious list of musicians: the Serbian guitar virtuoso Branko Mataja, the benju player Ustad Noor Bakhsh, the Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astatke and Santo and Johnny, best known for their 1959 steel-guitar hit “Sleep Walk.” These artists come from wildly different scenes, different eras, different continents. And yet, to the modern listener, all are similarly marked by an easy beauty, a genrelessness — a vibe.

Last month, I met with Ochoa, Johnson and Speer in Brooklyn, where Ochoa now lives. They were in town to rehearse tracks from their new album, “A La Sala,” for a new tour, their 19th. Much of their progression as a band has involved adding new layers to the stripped-down, airy sonic space they found in that barn — from vocals (sung by all three at once, though always mixed so Speer’s guitar melodies remain the focus) to the percussive, danceable sound of their last studio album, “Mordechai,” from 2020. “A La Sala,” however, goes in the other direction. It’s quieter, less busy, more like a return to the band’s earliest days in the barn in Burton — even though it was not recorded in the barn, and is, in fact, the first time they’ve made one of their own albums outside the barn.

This was a purely practical decision. When they got together to record, Ochoa was eight months pregnant, and being out in the middle of nowhere seemed like an unnecessary risk. Instead, they used Steve Christensen’s Houston studio, which is in an old warehouse: brick walls, concrete floors, train tracks nearby, a sheet-metal roof that got loud when it rained. All three members of Khruangbin become animated when talking about sound — the space around each tone, how to fill the right gaps without letting the music get crowded — but Speer is particularly obsessive. Between sessions for “A La Sala,” he would travel out to the barn with a field recorder and tape things like hand claps echoing around the space. These types of recordings can be used to create what’s called an “impulse response,” a model of the way the space reflects sound — which could then be used in the studio to make the music they were playing in the warehouse sound more open, more barnlike, more Khruangbin.

Once, out in Burton, Speer was noodling around on a little synth, and composed “Les Petits Gris,” the stripped-down track that closes the album. Throughout the recording, there is ambient noise: crickets, birdsong, creaking wood, the musicians’ hushed breaths. It feels like a direct rebuke to the idea that a band’s getting bigger and more successful has to mean getting busier, louder, more danceable.

The three now live far apart: Ochoa in Brooklyn, Speer in a tiny town north of San Francisco and Johnson in Houston. In Brooklyn, together for the first time in months, conversation turned to the upcoming tour. Speer said he wanted to spend it getting back to basics and becoming a better player. Johnson laughed: “I can’t believe Mark Speer said, ‘I want to be a better player.’” When they started, Ochoa and Speer explained, everything around them, all the different scenes of their Houston lives, contributed to their sound. But success and touring had pulled them from the environment that shaped them — something that did not help the music, because it was not what had given them their particular vibe.

What had? Speer described a wine bar in a town near his, where a group of local musicians played. He’d been eyeing it up, hoping to sit in on congas. It was this sort of exploration — being in different scenes, finding new things to try — that he wanted to return to. Johnson, when he’s home, still plays organ in his grandfather’s church. Ochoa tried to explain what Speer was driving at, what he meant by getting back to basics, by telling the story of a bad show they’d had at a huge venue. She had been pushing Speer on “being bold, and being bigger,” but he was struggling with his pedalboard. It was driving him bananas: Why did his guitar suddenly sound different? This was all the same gear he’d always used, the same stuff he’d used since the band began. Where had the magic gone?

It turned out that the stage was so big that the signal from his guitar was degrading as it ran through the very long cable required to cross it. It’s tempting to read this as a metaphor for success. But it was also the answer to the question of what made Khruangbin Khruangbin. Theirs was a sound of self-imposed limits. Not just of three of them playing, but also of the spaces between: the sounds of the barn, its birds and its crickets, the length of the guitar cable, a sense of distance, but never too much.

Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about the L’Rain song ‘‘Find It.’’

Read by MacLeod Andrews

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Emma Kehlbeck

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Grief empowered actor Abubakar Salim – now he’s making a video game about it

After losing a parent unexpectedly to cancer, the Hollywood star channeled his pain into ‘Tales Of Kenzera: Zau’

A bubakar Salim, best known for playing the lead role in open-world adventure Assassin’s Creed Origins , shot through 2023 like lightning. First he was cast in the second season of Game Of Thrones spin-off House Of The Dragon , then he played French general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas in Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon . And to cap the year off, he revealed his debut game as a developer, Tales Of Kenzera: Zau , with a giddy on-stage appearance at The Game Awards in December. For most, this would be a year of career highs – but Salim is only getting started.

We meet in a vintage studio in east London, where a prop gun lies discarded on a dusty piano. Gregarious and prone to fits of booming laughter, Salim is sitting in an old leather chair, and his excitement about Zau – now just a few weeks away from launch – is contagious. “It’s all happening too fast,” he giggles.

Out on April 23, Salim’s 2D platformer follows titular character Zau (played by Salim), a young shaman who bargains with Kalunga, the god of death, to bring his dead father back to life. It’s a deeply personal project – and is inspired by Bantu (an ethnolinguistic group across Africa) mythology that has been passed down through Salim’s Kenyan family.

Much like Zau, Salim values family highly. He credits his parents – his dad, a software engineer; his mum a carer – for supporting his creativity from an early age. “My father was a very good storyteller – he was very good at getting people to listen, and he took you on this journey,” says Salim. “But the artist-y side definitely came from my mum. She loved films, westerns, and books. There was an element of artistry that my mum exuded.”

Tragically, ten years ago when Salim was just starting to find steady work as an actor, his dad Ali died from cancer. “I remember thinking this wasn’t supposed to happen, this wasn’t part of the plan,” says Salim. “He was a very healthy man – [his cancer] even went into remission – and then suddenly it came back with a force.”

The experience shattered Salim’s “vague” plans for the future. “It made me realise that nothing is written. It really made me look creatively at my work and think, ‘if something like that can happen, what can happen tomorrow?’”

“What I’m aiming to be is the guy who opened the door for other storytellers”

Salim tried to “soldier on” and bear the weight of his grief on his own. Eventually, however, pretending to be OK felt “poisonous”, and he began speaking about the experience in therapy. “There’s a lot of power in being open and honest, and baring all, because you get to share that with people – and they get to share it with you,” says Salim. “It feels communal in a way. Honesty is the best way of connecting.”

Now, whenever Salim talks about his dad, it’s to celebrate his life, rather than linger on its loss. His eyes shine with pride when we talk about their relationship – and though he speaks modestly about his own abilities, he often makes his father sound like the world’s greatest storyteller. It’s a talent that Salim, who is effortlessly compelling while telling his own tales, has inherited.

Eventually, Salim started to see his loss as another story to be told, and the first seeds of Zau were sown. He considers the metroidvania genre of video games – in which players start off as weak characters and must find the right tools to explore large, often confusing worlds – a metaphor for grief in itself, and wanted to combine it with tales his father had passed down from his grandfather, who was a nganga (a spiritual healer in Bantu culture). But by the time he started taking the idea of developing a new game seriously, his acting career was in full flight. In 2017 he played vengeful warrior Bayek of Siwa in Assassin’s Creed Origins , and in 2020 landed a lead role on the TV side, starring as an android in Ridley Scott’s big-budget HBO sci-fi Raised By Wolves .

W hen it came to making Zau , Salim decided to found his own studio rather than risk pitching it somewhere that might jeapordise his creative vision. With self-conscious laughter, Salim says he started by constantly messaging people on social media. Some, including legendary game writers Mike Bithell and Caroline Marchal , offered advice on becoming a founder. Others loved Salim’s idea, and joined his fledgling company Silver Rain Games (now called Surgent Studios ). Using his own money, Salim funded the team while it made an early prototype for Zau , which eventually allowed him to find a publisher – Electronic Arts (EA) , one of the biggest in the world.

Last December, Salim revealed Zau to the world at The Game Awards 2023, a flashy Los Angeles ceremony that’s part annual awards bash, part marketing platform for new game reveals. The game’s premise, along with Salim’s enthusiasm at simply being represented at such a huge event, was widely praised online. And that momentum hasn’t slowed. “The reception has been ridiculously phenomenal,” he says. “It’s blown our expectations, and EA’s, out of the water. We’re in a place now where you cannot deny that being honest, open, truthful and artistic is the way forward, and something you should strive for.”

Like any studio head would be, Salim is now nervous about delivering on those expectations. But he also feels responsible for proving that games based on under-represented cultures can succeed in this industry. “There’s additional pressure of Zau being an African story, and feeling like this has got to really do well otherwise I could potentially screw up someone else’s chance of telling an African story,” he explains. “But the trick is to not think about that and focus on telling your own personal story, and delivering that the best way you can.”

“We’re in a place now where you cannot deny that being honest, open, truthful and artistic is the way forward”

Salim points out that the “beauty” of African tales and cultural stories lies in the oral tradition of telling them out loud. When we ask if he had any favourite stories he loved to hear as a child, Salim pauses. After a brief silence, Salim begins retelling a tale his dad told him about his own father in Kenya.

“It was raining one day in the village, and everyone was getting wet,” he says, suddenly very still in his chair. “My granddad, because he was a nganga, picked up a blade of grass and put it over his head. And he was suddenly dry. Then everyone started doing [the same thing], then everyone else was dry.”

As if he’s spent the last minute bottling it up, Salim immediately bursts into laughter. “I remember looking at my dad, like, ‘what were you smoking?’ But at the same time, he’s got that cheeky grin – it was all part and parcel of the story.”

“That just really sticks to me, because I remember the way he would tell it, I’d be so enamoured,” he explains. “Then as soon as he said the whole blade of grass thing, there was a moment of being like, ‘ah, okay, now you’re playing with me’. Because obviously his father did the same thing with him!”

As a result, Zau is a mix of Bantu culture – its protagonist goes on a quest to become a nganga just like Salim’s grandfather was – and Salim’s own story of loss. While grief is a universal emotion, we discuss the fact that everyone can experience it differently, and whether that makes Zau’s story easier or harder to relate to.

“The beauty of art is that you, the viewer, are reacting to it from your own perspective and putting your own ideas on it,” he says. “That’s what helps. I can’t relate [to] a kid fighting a giant lightning bug, but I can understand where he’s coming from. You can find a moment, or place, and remember being like that.”

Originally, Salim wanted Zau to send the message that it’s “OK to not be OK”. While that’s still true, he now hopes to encourage more people to tell their own stories as well. Salim points to critically acclaimed metroidvania games Dead Cells and Ori And The Blind Forest , both of which were massive inspirations to him – and says that he wants Zau to have a similar impact.

It’s an idea that he’s been thinking about more, lately. When we ask him what he’d rather be remembered as – an actor or developer – he says: “What I’m aiming to be is the guy who opened the door for other storytellers,” Salim says. Before its first game has even launched, he’s already planned out Tales Of Kenzera in the same way that Marvel , which announces its films years ahead of their release, does. Importantly, Salim also wants to get creators and writers from other cultures involved. “The idea of being able to open the door, like, ‘hey, come on in – I want to hear your stories’, that’s what I want to be remembered for.”

‘Tales of Kenzera: Zau’ is out April 23, 2024 for Nintendo Switch , PC , Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X|S .

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