The performance on the Sunday night, August 26, was entitled 'Japanese Spirit and Music - Voice, Shakuhachi and Shinobue.' The concert featured two Japanese music duos (with additions). It was held at the
Michiko Rehearsal Studio close to New York’s Times Square. A somewhat unusual
place, but very functional for the purpose, once one managed to get there
through the tourist crowds on Times Square.
The first pairing was Nobuko
Miyazaki and Emi Inaba. The set started with a solo shinobue, a Japanese transverse
bamboo flute, by Miyazaki. She was soon joined by Inaba, a proficient pianist
and composer, for a set of tunes that had all been composed by one these young ladies.
The first one, on which Miyazaki played the Western flute, left me wondering
whether this would be a concert of romantic but somewhat meaningless semi-classical
pieces played by two good musicians. I was proven wrong, luckily, as the pace
changed rather quickly afterwards. The next piece, Echo, an Inaba composition, was already quite different and quite fun!
It immediately demonstrated Inaba’s compositional talents.
The following piece was hers, too, Traveller. The musicians explained how they had met nine years ago in London
where Inaba had been a student of composition; how she had wanted to write a
piece to play with her friend: and how she had asked about the shinobue and its
scales in order to know how to write for the unusual instrument. In fact,
playing shinobue or any other traditional bamboo flute with a piano with its
fixed tuning is a challenge to the flutist This turned out to be one of the
highlights of the performance, a tune with a beautiful theme, followed by changing
dynamic and rhythmic patterns. The pianist played some complex yet attractive
patterns involving both hands, first in octaves, then in harmonies, which the
flute followed. The piece, as the one that followed it, was an enchanting mix
of Japanese and jazz sensibilities. Despite these clear jazz influences, all of
the music appeared written through with no improvisational elements.
A solo piano piece confirmed Inaba’s
skills both as a pianist and, primarily, as a composer. Again, the tune moved
dynamically between a sweet and harmonious beginning and an innovative and
strong middle before returning to the original melody.
On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by
a tsunami that destroyed a stunning amount of the coastline and killed some
15,000 people. Nobuko Miyazaki told the audience how she had visited the devastated
area in Iwate just a couple of weeks ago. She had then composed the tune that
was played next as a prayer dedicated to those who perished in the disaster. It
was a beautiful piece played on the shinobue, with some powerful inputs from
the pianist. The set ended with another jazzy piece by Emi Inaba. All in all, a nice performance, which was
hard to pigeonhole: just two clearly very talented musicians trying to balance
their act between Western and Japanese music.
None of this ambiguity was present when
Emme
and Akihiko Obama performed. In fact, Obama started their part of the event
with a classical Japanese shakuhachi solo piece, Daha. He played it with a jinashi shakuhachi, a longer version of
the classic Japanese bamboo flute with a deep sound. He switched to a shorter
flute when Emme joined him (he would use five different flutes of varying
lengths throughout the performance, so I won’t get into that anymore). This was
an innovative version of a minyoo, a
Japanese folk song arranged for just voice and shakuhachi. After the first song
together, the couple proceeded to play Edo
no komoriuta, a beautiful lullaby from Old Edo before it became Tokyo. The
version—again just by voice and the bamboo flute—contained some amazing
interplay between the musicians. It takes some out-of-the-box thinking when in
the arrangements for a voice-shakuhachi duet the rhythm would be provided by
the singer!
The next piece, Splendour of Sound, was honestly cooking, with Emme adding some
African colour and rhythm with a thumb piano. Obama provided some inventive lines
while Emme got into singing in the complex traditional nagauta style.
In Aoi
Tsubame, Shu Odamura joined in with a guitar. He had to wait for a lengthy
moment while Emme sang the theme unaccompanied by any other instrument—she is
just fantastic, her confidence based on the absolute command of her voice and
the genre—before he was able to join in. He started with an atmospheric solo,
followed by a sequence in which he and Emme interplayed in an almost bossa nova
–like style.
The piece led seamlessly into another
one, starting with a guitar-shakuhachi duet with interesting improvisational
exchanges. Suddenly, Emme joined and inserted some very potent vocals into the
slowly building music. This piece contained some of the most intensive playing
of the evening, with a searing shakuhachi solo by Obama.
At the end, all of the musicians
present got together for a fun Japanese tune, Zakiyaki, which Emme instructed the audience to participate in (which
we did by clapping our hands and joining in the catchy refrain). This was a
very engaging and fun moment, with Miyazaki and Inaba joining the rest of the
musicians on stage. In fact, the bamboo flute improvisations by Akihito Obama and
Nobuko Miyazaki, on shakuhachi and shinobue, respectively, were most enjoyable!
To calm the scene down before we all
had to go home, Emme and Obama performed one more tune. This once again brought
the solo human and bamboo voices together, the couple singing and playing with and without each other, both
showing more artistry and skill than reasonable for an average musician. The
beauty and peace of the Japanese music lingered with me as I stepped out to
fight the crowds in the neon lit hell of Times Square.
Just a few days later, on August 30,
Yoko and I went to listen to Obama once again, yet in a different setting. This
time he performed in Ran Tea House, just blocks away from where we live in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Obama’s performance tonight was part of a series of
cultural talks with Asian related artists from different fields, called uNtitleDdialogue initiated by Echo He
and Jessie Yang from New York University. This was the shakuhachi player’s last
engagement in New York as part of his six-month Asian Cultural Council
fellowship that had brought him here to research the intersection between
traditional Japanese shakuhachi music and the American improvisational
jazz-inspired music.
This concert consisted entirely of
traditional solo shakuhachi music, with six numbers of mostly classic honkyoku style. Most of the tunes, such
as Honshirabe and Shika-no-Tone, are meditational, the
shakuhachi not only playing a tune in flute style; an important part of the music
consists of the sounds and atmosphere created by a variety of blowing
techniques. Obama also played Kumoi-jishi, a traditional but not
meditational piece in koten style,
which the Buddhist monks had made just for fun, and Ko-Myo, a goeika Buddhist
hymn.
The performance was followed by a brief
lecture by Obama of the history of the shakuhachi, with demonstrations of the various
techniques and different types of flutes that he had brought with him. This
was clearly interesting to the crowd of more than fifty people, mostly of
Chinese origin (my Swedish buddy Björn and I were amongst the handful of
Westerners present). Shakuhachi, as so much of Japanese culture was introduced
to the islands from China as early as the 6th century. Since then,
the music developed in a uniquely Japanese style, while it slowly disappeared
from the mainland.
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| Yoko, Emme and me |
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| Obama, Yoko and me |
