Alto saxophonist Doug Yokoyama grew up in Delaware and spent his early musical training with tenor player Hal Schiff. He moved west to California and fell into a more culturally specific interpretation of jazz. Although his list of musical idols is fairly standard -- John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, and Ornette Coleman -- his engagement with Asian Improv Records and its co-founder, tenor saxophonist Francis Wong, holds the promise for further exploration of the nexus of the jazz idiom and the Asian-American experience, building on the work of Wong, Jon Jang, and Glenn Horiuchi. Identities, Yokoyama's first album with Asian Improv, was fairly straight-ahead, but it nonetheless presented Yokoyama as a technically proficient young player with the tools to become a force in Asian-American jazz down the road. ~ Nathan Thornburgh, Rovi