‘Perfections and flaws.’ Musician captures Richland roots with jazz album about Hanford

Growing up in the Tri-Cities, Denin Koch saw atomic influences everywhere, in restaurant names, at bowling alleys and as his mascot at Richland High School.

“It’s really ingrained into our culture in a way that’s unique. Other places don’t necessarily have things like that,” Koch said.

But it was a trip to the B Reactor at the Hanford Site that made him think. At 19, he stood inside the vast chamber of the historic B Reactor, looking around. The B Reactor is the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor, where plutonium for the Fat Man bomb was produced.

“When you stand in that building, you’re forced to confront a global history and one of the most important and influential inventions that mankind has created,” Koch said.

That confrontation inspired him to pick up a pencil right when he got home, and begin composing a song.

At the time, in 2016, he was a music student at Whitworth University in Spokane. He’d been playing guitar since he was young — he’d found his dad’s old guitar in a closet and decided to pick it up. Soon, he joined his middle school jazz band.

“Jazz can be a vehicle not only to express what you want as a composer, emotionally, but it also puts emphasis on the performer, too,” Koch said.

B Reactor

After his B Reactor tour, he wrote a song called “b reactor.” Koch had been writing music for a while, but this was the first time it was so personal — and the first time the song just worked. He didn’t need to edit a thing.

“As a creative expression, it achieved everything that I needed it to for that particular concept,” Koch said. “It fell out of my head all at once. … I started writing and then I kind of blacked out for a half hour or so, and it was done.”

Koch said the song expresses the paradox of the B Reactor.

“It’s been an amazing scientific achievement and has helped a lot of people and brought WWII to an end, and has been so incredible in so many ways. It also has created a lot of consequences and new realities that we now have to deal with,” he said.

Koch played the song for years. Then, as a master’s student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., one of his professors heard “b reactor” and encouraged Koch to write more like it.

Manhattan Project album

That’s when he decided to write a conceptual album about the story of the Manhattan Project. Other tracks on the album include “j. robert oppenheimer” and “the einstein-szilard letter.”

The “re: manhattan project” album will be released Aug. 6, on the 75th anniversary that the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Three days later, the Fat Man bomb would drop on Nagasaki — the plutonium for that bomb was produced at the Hanford site.

One of Koch’s favorite pieces is the final movement on the album called “the fields the river the sky.”

The movement comes after an emotional journey through the Tri-Cities’ history, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of WWII.

“I really just wanted to write a really, pretty hope song,” Koch said. “It’s a love letter to the Tri-Cities. The natural beauty of it, and it’s complex history. It’s gratitude for the place that I grew up, for all of its perfections and flaws.”

Koch wants to perform an orchestral version of his work with the Mid-Columbia Symphony in an upcoming season. He also plans to bring a band to perform this album in the Tri-Cities, hopefully in the summer of 2021.

“I hope that (this music) gives people a chance to think about the complex nature of things that we deal with in everyday life. In everything we see, and everything we do, there’s so many subtle nuances, that I think it’s important to understand where we came from and why we have things the way we do in the Tri-Cities,” Koch said.