How a Buffalo Soldier Changed the Life of Latin Jazz Master John Calloway

Not many in the 21st century can say their life has been changed by a Buffalo Soldier. Then there’s John Calloway, and an entirely unexpected family tale from the Philippines that reconfigured his identity.

In the Bay Area, there’s no mystery around the San Francisco flutist, percussionist and educator. Calloway is a Latin jazz master who’s nurtured generations of young musicians as a professor at San Francisco State and the director of the Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco. But as a mixed-race Filipino American, he’s always felt between worlds, beset by questions about how he looks and speaks.

“If I’m Filipino, how come I have light skin, don’t speak Tagalog and don’t have a Spanish surname?” he said.

The astonishing discovery of the story of his Filipino roots, a saga enmeshed with the advent of United States’ global empire and a campaign of political persecution, fueled his creation of John Calloway & the Afro-Filipino Project, which celebrates Filipino American Heritage Month at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Oct. 17 and the Oakland Museum of California on Oct. 20.

Featuring a stellar cast of African-American, Filipino, and Filipino-American artists, including bassist Ron Belcher, drummer Deszon Claiborne and Conrad Benedicto and Manuel Dragon on kulintang instruments, the ensemble will reprise Calloway’s suite Buffalo Soldiers and the Philippine American War: A Crisis of Conscience at the Oakland Museum.

“The gig at Kuumbwa is the Afro-Filipino Project, which brings together two different worlds with new compositions combining traditional instruments of the Philippines with jazz and blues, as well as Afro-Filipinos and our musical influences,” Calloway explained. “The key thing is that people come together to create meaningful music reflective of their identities.”

The long-buried answers regarding Calloway’s identity surfaced suddenly about 10 years ago, when he received a copy of the essay anthology Mixed Blessings: The Impact of the Colonial Experience On Politics and Society In the Philippines. It included a chapter by Australian historian Gill H. Boehringer about a John W. Calloway.

Calloway’s paternal grandfather, born in 1872, was a Buffalo Solider, an African-American noncommissioned officer serving in the segregated U.S. Army. He died when Callaway’s father was 13, “and we knew very little about him, but when the book showed up 10 years ago it blew us out of the water,” Calloway said, noting he shares his grandfather’s middle initial.

“I have a different middle name, but to see ‘John W. Calloway’ as the first three words of the chapter and to find out about his experience as a Buffalo Solider in the Philippines was more than mind-blowing.”

Among his discoveries was that struggling with identity is something of a Calloway legacy. Before his grandfather was sent to the Philippines, he fought in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish American War, the conflict that turned the U.S. into global imperial power with territories in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and South Pacific (Guam and the Philippines).

In the Philippines, the war against Spain quickly turned into a brutal campaign to suppress the independence of the newly declared Philippine Republic. Many Buffalo Soldiers were sent to fight in a war that was cast in starkly racist terms, as British writer Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” urged the U.S. to replace Spain as a colonial power and uplift “Your new-caught, sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.”

Many Buffalo Soldiers wanted to earn credit for the Black community back home by serving with distinction, a dynamic carried over from the thousands of Black men who served in the Union Army during the Civil War (and that was replayed, with disappointment, again in World War I and World War II). That hope often co-existed with sympathy for the Philippine anti-colonial struggle, a sentiment that canny independence activists fed “by scattering leaflets in Central Luzon telling Black soldiers they were fighting and dying in a war for their political masters while their kin were being lynched at home,” writes historian Gill H. Boehringer.

Back home, the African-American press was often vocal in opposing U.S. colonial ambitions, and Calloway was a regular correspondent for The Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper in Virginia. His missives provided “an account of how, and why, some pro-Filipino sentiments were developing amongst the Americans, especially the Black troops,” Boehringer wrote.

But one letter in particular, to a Filipino friend who supported the independence movement, derailed Sgt. Major Calloway’s military career. While serving in the 24th infantry, he wrote of being “constantly haunted by the feeling of how wrong morally we Americans are in the present affair with you.” The letter’s discovery by military intelligence led to his court martial; the fact that he’d married a Filipina was considered proof of his treachery.

“He was imprisoned at the Presidio, and tried to get the conviction overturned,” Calloway said. Upon his release, he returned to the Philippines, then was deported and returned to the U.S. territory again, “where he spent the rest of his life,” Calloway said. It’s where he and his wife had 14 children, including Calloway’s father, one of the last born, in 1919.

While learning his new family history, Calloway never thought of exploring it in music. He’d spent his career in Latin jazz and Cuban music, including recordings with Cuban jazz luminaries such as bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez, conguero Carlos “Patato” Valdez and pianist Omar Sosa. He’s recorded more than a dozen albums with fellow Mission District native John Santos.

But when the California Jazz Conservatory asked him to put on a Black History Month concert in 2022, he wrote a grant to develop compositions exploring his Buffalo Solider lineage.

“And after a long beautiful journey playing Afro-Latin music, this whole other thing came about, a much deeper project about my inner self and identity,” Calloway said.

“At the deepest level, this is something I’ve carried with me since adolescence. But this project is in its infancy. I want to pay homage to all the Afro-Filipinos who play music, like Sugar Pie DeSanto and Joe Bataan.”

John Calloway & the Afro-Filipino Project performs Thursday, Oct. 17, at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz; details here. The ensemble also performs Sunday, Oct. 20, at the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland; details here.