Japanese Spirit and Music

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 6^th century. Since then, the music developed in a uniquely Japanese style, while it slowly disappeared from the mainland.

Yoko, Emme and me

Obama, Yoko and me

The evening ended in an informal manner celebrating Akihito Obama’s completion of the stay in the US and his forthcoming 2^nd of September birthday. While Emme brought out the cake, Obama jammed with a ukulele and guitar player demonstrating in practice the fertile middle ground between traditional shakuhachi music and contemporary jazz.

Lotus Position @ Somethin’ Jazz, 11 August 2012

Obama is a crowd magnet, for sure, but I was surprised to see a line on the sidewalk as Yoko and I arrived in front of Somethin’ Jazz on 52^nd Street on this late Saturday afternoon. After all, this was Akihito Obama, a Japanese shakuhachi player. Almost everyone in the queue was Japanese and I saw Satoru Steve Kobayashi, the owner of the club, checking names in a list in his hand. Luckily, I had made a reservation online earlier in the day. Clearly, this was going to be a cultural event. When we entered the pleasant club space it was crowded and we could see familiar faces belonging to well-known musicologists, academics and people into Japanese culture as well as some from the Japanese consulate in New York.

The musicians entered the stage and Obama, a thin unassuming young man, explained how this was a very important event for him: his first concert in New York! He further explained how in Japan he usually talks a lot during concerts, but he has seen that musicians in New York don’t do so, so he will follow their example.

He started the concert with an atmospheric shakuhachi improvisation which the drummer, Akira Horikoshi, soon joined. The sound of the bamboo flute was thick and breathy setting the stage for an almost mystical atmosphere. Switching to a shorter version of the flute, Obama played a minyo (Japanese folk tune) –like piece that led to an imaginative improvisation backed by Horikoshi’s drumming. Obama bent the tones of the flute so that the impression was almost like of a rubber band stretching, still playing perfectly in tune. The shakuhachi has only five finger holes forcing the player to find the right pitch by a variety of techniques that include covering the holes partly and in different combinations and changing the way you blow. Unlike with the Western flute, playing the shakuhachi involves changing your embouchure, changing the position of the flute, and even twisting your neck in a specific way called kubifuri. All these techniques contribute to the almost magical sound of the ancient instrument.

Akihito Obama started like virtually all shakuhachi players have, studying the traditional shakuhachi music created in the Buddhist temples and by the mendicant Zen Buddhist monks, komuso, hundreds of years ago and reaching its current shape during the Edo period (1600-1868). Obama is, however, more known for his own style of music that incorporates influences from jazz and electronic music. This was the first time we heard his music.

The Japanese masters were joined by a local addition, Brooklynite Joe Harrison on guitar. The next piece was a slow and beautiful tune, which Horikoshi accompanied on brushes. Harrison played a crisp solo, which Yoko classified as fusion-like, somewhat disapprovingly. This was followed by a very thoughtful piece in which Obama’s thick shakuhachi intertwined with a countermelody played by the guitar, leading to an effect-filled guitar solo that intensifying with Horikoshi beating his drums with mallets. After a mallet solo, the music calmed with Obama switching back to his longer flute. The last number of the first set contained an angular, somewhat atonal melody and some nice electronics work by Harrison.

I got the impression that Joe Harrison was a new addition to the group, which would explain that he was at times slightly stiff in his playing. And I could see him reading the music in a concentrated manner during several of the pieces. My impression is backed by the fact that the Somethin’ Jazz website announcing the concert listed Obama and Horikoshi, but continued “Someone – piano or guitar or bass.”

At the beginning of the second set Obama resumed talking. He said that Joe had told him to speak, but that he was nervous because his English teacher was in the audience. Needless to say, this brought out laughter from the crowd. Obviously, an American with similar command of Japanese – or any other foreign language for that matter – would not shy away from showing his proficiency. But the Japanese are modest and decent people and humility is a virtue, unlike in this country of brash and shameless self-promotion.

The second set introduced a special guest, Japanese singer Emme. The first piece Tsuki was about the moon. Obama introduced the sweet melody with the shakuhachi. It was then taken over by a solo voice and finally completed as a lovely shakuhachi-voice duet. Next came a lullaby for adults, Oyasumi, which Emme sang exquisitely accompanied by the guitar and bells. Obama’s playing was wonderful as he produced beautiful bird twitter like effects on the bamboo flute, reminiscent of the shakuhachi classic Tsuru no sugomori or ‘Nesting cranes.’ As the song evolved it developed rhythmic complexity but remained soft and soothing. Continuing on the lullaby theme, Obama pleaded with the audience, “please don’t sleep.” There was no risk of that during the beautiful, rather intense waltz that Horikoshi and Obama, wielding again the smaller flute, introduced and that made Emme dance before her singing part started. Joe Harrison had switched to an acoustic guitar and the song had almost Irish atmosphere, while Emme’s singing was tinted with shimauta-colourings from the southern Japanese islands.

The two final numbers of the concert returned to the trio format and demonstrated some of the most powerful shakuhachi of the evening. Obama masters the difficult instrument in such a way that his playing is never showy. Although he possesses a tremendous technique, he doesn’t draw attention to it: the focus is always on the music and the musicality (this is a sign of mature artistry, as was the case with Miles Davis or John Coltrane, post-Giant Steps). Harrison had also settled in and played a very good and inventive slide solo. The last piece was the most commanding of the evening, and the only one on which Horikoshi resorted to more conventional jazz drumming with sticks on cymbals. It involved some strong shakuhachi and electric guitar as the tempo was ramped up before the ending.

As the applause died, Obama highlighted another difference between Tokyo and New York. Here, there would be two other acts following tonight and so there was no time for playing any further. Indeed, the next band and some of its most eager followers were already waiting in the back of the room as we streamed out. It would be a challenge for them to create equally original and inspiring music and to fill the house with an equally dedicated audience.

Elsa Nilsson @ Somethin' Jazz, 31 July 2012

Elsa Nilsson performed in front of a small but attentive audience. The venue was Somethin’ Jazz, the younger sister of the club with the same name in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, now celebrating its second anniversary on the 52^nd Street in New York. Elsa had brought with her a band consisting of Renato Diz on piano, Yuka Tadano on bass and Cody Rahn on drums.

The repertoire over the two generous sets consisted of a mix of originals and arrangements of folk melodies from Elsa’s home country of Sweden. The young flutist from Göteborg arrived in New York a year ago via Seattle. It was clear that this was her gig and she was in charge of the music, despite her modest manners. The sound of the band was consistent and very pleasant, erring on the side of smooth contemporary jazz with no major surprises or dramatics. As often tends to be the case with flute-led bands, there were some Latin flavors blended into the mix.

The first set started with an original, which Elsa played on an alto flute with an almost vibratofree tone. The band’s sound initially reminded me of some of the classic Scandinavian quartets on ECM records (think Arild Andersen or Lars Jansson), with a crisp piano, string bass and drumming that accompanies the music instead of just providing the beat. The tune, which started as a ballad and moved between minor and major keys, also had a number of rhythmic changes that made it interesting. Yuka Tadano played her first solo of the night with a thick clean tone. The second piece, Extra Shock, also an original, was somewhat livelier with a brisker tempo.

The band fit perfectly into the medium-sized space with near-perfect acoustics, at least for this kind of music, allowing each of the instruments to be heard clearly. Unfortunately, there were only ten people in the audience (three of whom were Elsa’s own support troops) occupying about a third of the tables. Perhaps this is understandable, given that it was a Tuesday night and the performers were not yet widely known.

The rest of the first set comprised a series of three Swedish tunes, starting with a folk song from the Dalarna region, Kristallen den fina, arranged in 7/4. There were some fine moments in the tune with a low bass vamp against the drumbeat while Diz plucked on the piano strings and the flute provided some atmospheric effects. Elsa’s solo was slightly stiff tending towards somewhat square on-the-beat phrasing. She clearly found her groove in the next tune, Allt under himmelens fäste, which was performed with a vaguely Latin beat. The piano started with nicely dissonant tones and evolved into a solo reminiscent of McCoy Tyner. Tadano played an inspired bass solo. The problem with the piece was that about midway the there was a noticeable acceleration in the tempo.

The next piece was probably my favorite throughout the entire evening. Gläns over sjö och strand sounded like another folk song, but when I chatted with Elsa during the intermission she revealed it was actually a Christmas song written in the 1970s. Elsa’s mother had observed that Swedish Christmas songs all sound like they were funeral marches; hence, this arrangement had Rahn playing a funeral march tremolo on the snare, à la Saint James Infirmary, which perfectly fit the slow beautiful melody played in the low register of the alto flute. Elsa added some Arabic scales for flavor, which also seemed to go well with the melancholy Nordic mood. While the slow march was is proceeding towards its destination, Yuka Tadano picked up a walking bass line, still in 3/4, which led to a gradual build-up of collective improvisation after good alto flute and bass solos, before the serene melody resumed.

The final piece of the first set was a straight funk unabashedly in Herbie Mann style. Most enjoyable, I must say, with fun solos by Renato Diz and Elsa. Unfortunately, again, as Rahn started his solo the tempo accelerated so rapidly that I initially thought it was an intentional devise. After the drum solo, the band caught up and the tune ended with a solid steady beat.

During the intermission, Elsa was chatting with her friends and with some customers, while the rest of the band sat at one of the front tables. The thin Yuka Tadano dressed in a summer dress grabbed a large glass of beer. All the while the owner, or chairman, of Somethin’ Jazz, Satoru Steve Kobayashi worked the tables serving drinks and snacks to the patrons and charging those who were leaving (I heard one of the single men who had had a couple of drinks at a tall table complain that he had not been aware of the music charge. Somethin’ Jazz doesn’t have live music every night, so people apparently stop by in the pleasant 3^rd floor bar just for drinks after work.). The bald-headed Kobayashi is also the man behind the original Somethin’ Jazz in Tokyo and is a well-known jazz character in Japan.

Sipping my Pinot Grigio, I was thinking about how some bands and musicians have left an indelible mark on the way jazz is played today. The classic Coltrane Quartet is an obvious example and its influences were evident tonight too, not least in the playing of Renato Diz. I could not help but discover nuances from the original Return to Forever, prior to its electronic fusion reincarnation, and Joe Farrell’s flute in some of the music tonight. So light and effortlessly moving it was.

The second set began with Arabic influences in an original in which Rahn accompanied the flute by drumming with his hands. The second tune started with a solo flute and then moved effortlessly into a medium rhumba, a nice transition for a Swedish folk tune. Elsa’s flute tone was getting thicker presumably as she was now more comfortable with the setting. The third tune, Buckwheat and Banana Bread (at least that’s how I heard her call it), was the set’s most modernist piece, with the flute and piano providing the most ‘off’ solos of the evening. It was moderately ambitious and good as such, but in some ways the least pleasing, perhaps because it came in between the generally rather harmonious concert, as demonstrated by what followed: a beautiful slow waltz in which all players shone. Elsa played a beautiful solo, as did Tadano on her bass. Rahn was at his most sensitive reacting to the whims of the soloists, playing slow triplets in tune with the piano.

The final tune was another Swedish number, Uti vår hage, turned into a Latin celebration. Renato Diz played was at his best, playing a full-fledged salsa piano solo that drove the small audience into wild applause. It was a superb ending to the good concert.

Westbeth, July 6, 2012

The start of the performance was marked by a piercing scream emanating from behind us. This was followed by the performer shuffling into the room arms outstretched and with a frozen grimace on her face. She sat at the grand piano and started to hit octaves with her left hand while singing a somewhat mad, cabaret-like tune in German. The man sitting on my left found it very amusing (well, it was) and was giggling for the duration of the piece. We were at Westbeth, an artist community on the far west side of Manhattan.

Some forty people had gathered in the Community Room on this Friday night to experience the eclectic performance put together by Beth. The group itself looked interesting and it’s quite clear that one had to have somewhat special interests for this kind of music to be here. Initially, especially, the average age was quite high (“We’re the youngest here,” observed Yoko) and there was even a group of sweet octogenarian ladies, but later several younger people floated in. If we no longer were the youngest, at least I coming here from the office without changing looked the most conventional.

Westbeth has been around for more than four decades. Opened in 1970 in the West Village neighbourhood, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and J.M. Kaplan Foundation, Westbeth offers both a space for exhibiting a wide range of arts, as well as affordable housing to both established and emerging artists in different fields. The complex consists of 13 buildings surrounding a pleasant courtyard. The Community Room is a space for music and other performing arts by the resident artists and visitors. We were here at the invitation of tonight’s star, singer Beth Griffith, with whom Yoko collaborated in the context of the dancer Sachiyo Ito’s 30^th artistic anniversary performance last year.

The program consisted of a number of avant-garde songs, like the starting number, Recitativaria (1971/72) for singing harpsichordist by Mauricio Kagel (the harpsichord effect had been created by placing strips of paper between the chords of the grand piano) and another rather humorous piece for voice and piano, Orthopädische Lieder (1994) by Susanne Meis. Beth performed the John Cage piece The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) in which the pianist Jeffrey Middleton only used the piano as a percussion instrument banging on its sides with his hands. In Dennis Báthory-Kitsz’ composition I Lift My Heavy Heart (2007) she was joined by Andrew Bolotowsky on flute and Bern Nix on guitar. This rather serious piece contained some beautiful segments in which the voice and flute intermingled in fugue-like lines.

Two quite lovely pieces both from 2004 were by Noah Creshevsky who was present in the audience. He explained that, as primarily a composer of electronic music, he had not collaborated with many performers, but had he met people like tonight’s leading star earlier, this might have been different. In Psalm XXIII Beth sang against taped music which contained both her own recorded voices and other electronic instruments. The angelic choirs typical to church music were largely replaced by sighs. The combined effect of the carefully interwoven voices and beautiful melodies was almost heavenly. The second piece was Once, the title of which referred to that each of the sounds on the playback tape created by various instruments ranging from violin to trombone were only played once.

The first part of the concert ended with another light number, Country Time (1979) by Beth Anderson, in which Beth Griffith recited a rhythmic poem about things associated with the countryside accompanied by her own banging on a podium imitating the sounds of horse hooves and her sister producing twittering sounds on a small whistle.

During the intermission, half of the audience rushed to the courtyard for apparently badly needed smokes.

The latter part of the concert consisted of only one lengthy piece by John McGuire, Beth’s husband. A Cappella (1995/97) was also for voice and playback. It was fast paced and rhythmic flowing smoothly and timelessly as if over an African vastness. It had a hypnotic quality that lulled us to a sweet almost trancelike feeling. The rhythm as well as the repeated call-and-response patterns, which Beth performed singing invariably high and low, did have an African feeling. The piece went on for a long while, but that was an important dimension of it and how we came to enjoy it.

After this interesting and enjoyable performance we walked up Washington Street, by the High Line, past all the fashionable and funky terrace restaurants bustling with life on the balmy July evening. People dressed up for parties were hurrying past to meet their dates. A bald man was shouting rudely to his date, a young woman in a yellow party dress, that it was over between them if she jumped into that taxi (I wished she would have done so). Beefy bouncers were screening youth for entry into the clubs from which loud music streamed out each time the door was opened for a lucky entrant. We reflected on how different this place must have been when Westbeth opened. Still a decade or two ago, this area in the northwest corner of West Village was a dangerous no-man’s land; now it was the home of high-end fashion boutiques, restaurants and wealth. How lucky the artists were to have their own place there now.