GR: I may be wrong, but I think I heard that you were born in the Philippines. How old were you when you moved to the States?
SI: I was born in Anaheim, California in Martin Luther King Hospital. I lived in California and Iowa until I was 4. I lived 12 years in Houston and I am going on my sixteenth year in NYC.
GR: What was it like growing up in Houston in the '70s and '80s?
SI: I grew up around my family and family friends--around Filipinos. I was a minority in school along with Vietnamese and Mexicans. Nowadays, Houston is such a huge and diverse city. There are so many Asians and Hispanics. There are so many immigrants from all over. Great food!
GR: I was in College Station for a little while in the '70s and even as a third grader I was getting a lot of grief from racist, redneck youth.
SI: Sorry you got that as a child. I was very fortunate to be around great people and I made really nice friends growing up. At the time we lived maybe half an hour from the Klu Klux Klan--which does not exist there any more--but they never came to our neighborhood. My father, who is a doctor and formally a surgeon, once operated on the Grand Dragon. He was all smiles, and very proud of that. Imagine--they had to come to my dad for the operation!
GR: What drew you to music? What made you decide to pick up the drums? It wasn't your first instrument, was it?
SI: I began playing piano at the age of 4. I played classical piano for 14 years and then I played piano and organ in school. Filipinos love to sing and play piano, so my mother put us all in piano and I sung in several choirs. I started to play drums in high school for a hardcore/punk band named Devil Donkey. It was really fun and a great pleasure to play drums and groove.
GR: When you first started drumming, were you aware or concerned in any way with the social unacceptability of a girl (much less an Asian girl) playing drums? SI: No. I come from a pretty progressive family. My parents are very open-minded people. They are also really strengths for me. They learned their open-mindedness through wisdom, experience, and five kids. It never dawned on me that society would be so behind the times!
GR: When you started drumming, were you interested in jazz? Did you have interest in Asian percussion back then?
SI: I started in a punk band in high school. I also started to listen to jazz and had an affinity for it. My parents listened to jazz, the older styles. Before college, I went on my first trip alone to the Philippines to visit my family and see the country. I came to NYC when I was 17 years old as an artist and a painter. I came for school, but I brought my drums and that was that. I started to play gong music, Filipine Kulintang, and Javanese and Balinese Gamelan.