Big in Japan! Japanese Free Jazz from 1969 to 1979: the first avant-garde generation

“They want to be the agents, not the victims of history. [...] It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate – confusion between him who worships and that which is woshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man”

(Philip K. Dick “Man in the High Castle”)

I can’t think of a better introduction to this post but Philip K. Dick words. In effect, when I think about the japanese avant garde musicians, it comes to my mind the hell of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with those burning and deformed bodies. It is as if artists, starting with Tatsumi Ijikata and Kazuo Ohno and their butoh dance, had incorporated those images into themselves giving them the life and the voice of their outburst moments, as if those burning and deformed bodies wanted to say something human during their extreme suffering, and not despite of it.

More prosaically, if you want to start to explore the world of the avant garde japanese jazz from the 1960s, a good starting point is Teruto Soejima’s book Free Jazz in Japan: A Personal History,  issued in English in 2014 by Public Bath Press. Pivotal figure of those years, Soejima describes with anecdotes and photographs those magic years, starting from 1969 up to 1979. After that time, he assures us, music has drastically changed from free jazz avant garde to free pop avant garde. A genre he doesn’t like that much.

If we want to start and explore those years, the first figure to investigate is drummer Masahiko Togashi. He started playing as a mature musician in duo with saxophonist Sadao Watanabe at the end of the Sixties, after the baptism of fire of the post-bop record with the Four Unit by pianist Masahiko Sato, with whom he will collaborate also in the future; in albums like Speed and Space, recorded in Tokyo in 1969 you’ll find initial scattered percussions as in the AEOC albums – that have gave life to their career only few years after Togashi’s – in order to create an atmosphere of recollection, then with a piece like Panorama piano and tenor gain the foreground creating an incandescent and dramatic atmosphere.

This expressive urge is typical of Japanese free jazz, and in this it goes even far beyond the original African American free jazz. Togashi’s style on drums recall that of Max Roach playing with Cecil Taylor on one side, and Sunny Murray’s on the other hand: coloristic, full of nuances, cymbals, plates, but it’s also very accurate, net and fast. After a few listenings, Togashi will gain his own authority in your head and all the possible comparisons will give space to a musician that has something to say for sure.

Masayuki Takayanagi (1932-1991) was onstage since the end of the Fifties. Initially ostracized after he described the world of (cool) jazz as “a bunch of losers”, after he descovered free playing from the end of the Sixties he became an active sonic terrorist. He worked to various projects and collaborated also to various records of Kaoru Abe – we’ll talk about him later – in various duo records.

April is The Cruellest Month, recorded in 1975 by Bernard Stollman for ESP Disk, sees a trio (Takayanagi plus flutes, reeds and drums) is an extraordinary climax, from sounds scattered here and there to a pure wall of sound. Andy Beta on Pitchfork defined Takayanagi as the missing link between Ayler, Merzbow and the Acid Mother Temple, but in fact he was a musician capable of shifting from the Fifties cool jazz to the experiments with feedbacks and all the range of sounds an electric amplified guitar can create, also beating her with a violin arco or with metal parts, that led to comparisons with Jimi Hendrix and Sonny Sharrock. During the 1990s he toured with John Zorn and became famous outside of Japan also.

Trumpeter Itaru Oki, born in Kobe in 1941, started his career as a koto player since that was the instrument mastered by his mother. During the Fifties he switched to trumpet, starting playing in university bands. He studied the style of Kenny Dorham, Fumio Nanri and Sadao Watanabe, and from the Sixties onward he started playing with the group ESSG led by Masahiko Sato.

In 1974 he started living in Paris, where he played with expat fellow Takashi Kato and with Art Farmer, Maynard Ferguson and, above all, Steve Lacy, having bassist Alan Silva as a trait d’union with European and US free musicians. With Lacy he recorded the beautiful The Wire, where Lacy is in a way infected by Japanese urge to communicate.

But in records like Mirage (1977) by the Itaru Oki Trio you can perceive the diversity of style Oki approached during his career, even if elaborated in a personal way. Less burning and dense in comparison with the rest of the material exposed in this post, Oki’s mastery is undeniable and admirable. The record has its place somewhere in between the Blue Note albums of almost-free-jazz the label issued during the past decade (the Sixties), a sound still vivid during Oki’s career if you think that Sam Rivers’ Dimensions and Extentions, recorded in 1967, was released only the same year of Mirage.

Bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa (1931-1998) was a pivotal figure in the development of Japanese free jazz. In particular we’ll remember a live session with drummer Elvin Jones, during Coltrane tour in Japan in 1966. A pioneer in solo bass performances – he started working on it during the same period as Barre Phillips – in 1969, even if these works will be documented only many years after.

He started working to collaborate with Kaoru Abe at a certain point during his career, and apart from various duo performances as those recorded into the album Duo 75 Nord, the two musicians will release a record with guitarist Derek Bailey and trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, titled Aida’s Call and recorded six month before Abe’s departure.

The album start with a guitar non idiomatic chord sequence, with the alto moaning just to create a nice contrast. After few minutes, the electrified trumpet of Kondo enters, now surrounding the other players, now in the background and now in the foreground. Then finally Yoshizawa produces a huge drone with the arco on the strings. Then at a certain point he starts producing scattered few notes in contrast with those moments in which he dominates. Music makes himself now more excited, now more relaxing, but after a good third of the album the four explode literally on disturbing but exalting tones. The Man From S.L.A.P.P.Y. is finally another speaking-in-tongues approach to music, recalling Albert Ayler but more mockingly. Last Spear Core get back to the more harsh moments of the second piece from this album.

But if you have to name one musician that possibly is well known to the public even outside Japan, even on a niche as free improv, multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Abe (1949-1978) is cerainly that name. More similar to the cliché of the tormented genius, that people all around the world understand very well in order to take the art away from their common life so not to mix too much themselves with it, nonetheless Abe’s geniality is genuine since him being self-thought on alto, clarinet and harmonica.

For sure his music, developed since when he was thrown away from school at the age of 17 up to that entire year, until 1968, has something sincere to say as all the other musicians involved in this article, but his life, tragically ended after an overdose of meds, stand up for himself and still continues to fascinate people all over the world, for the reasons I have express here above.

In order to represent his art, I have chosen his duet album with Yoshizawa, Duo 75 Nord, on one hand because it represent his style at his peak, but also because in a way it removes him from the clichés of the solo-romantic-performances he risks to be traped in. The dialogue with his peer Yoshizawa here is varied and shows all the eclecticity of the two musicians. On the other hand, Yoshizawa is more than an accompanist, but a high-ranking comprimary, through his arcoes, plugged and plucked notes, and Cage-like silent moments.

Born in Tokyo in 1942, pianist Yosuke Yamashita passed through classical composition. During the Seventies he founded his own trio with Akira Sakata (alto) and Takeo Moriyama (drums) in 1969. First European tours were a success. During the Eighties he gave life to another trio with Cecil McBee and Pheroan akLaff. He is finally famous also for his scores for films, like Dr. Akagi and Exstasy of the Angels.

Chiasma, third live album from the original Yosuke Yamashita Trio, is a clear example of how incredible is this combo. Since Ornette piano-less bands, that revolutionized the music giving the horns more harmonic freedom, this is the first time we hear a bass-less ensemble, and the result is that piano had to transform itself in a three-pointed instrument, harmonically, melodically and rhythmically. The result is almost a fiery tarantella, as you can hear in some passages by the AEOC with Muhal Richard Abrahms on piano recorded few years after this record.

We kind of saved the best for last with drummer Yoshisaburo ‘Sabu’ Toyozumi, the only non-US musician to enter, in 1971, in the AACM of Chicago; he has been one of the most important Japanese free jazz drummers. Perfect link between Japan and the United States, he imported into his native land such important musicians as Derek Bailey, Misha Mengelberg, and Sunny Murray.

A disciple of the late Watatsumido, shakuhachi player and zen master, Toyozumi declared more than once to have been helped by nature to give life to his own style. Water Weed, released in 1975, on one hand fortified the tradition of the ‘records from a drummer’ typical of the US free jazz, on the other had with its typical beginning full of sparse percussions it is the perfect liaison between the East and the West. Pointillistic as much as coloristic, Toyozumi is able to paint a wider landscape with its instrument, an ideal ground for his partners in order to express themselves.

As I wrote at the beginning, with the end of the Seventies the first wave of Japanese free jazz ends, leaving space to a more poppish approach to the music or to an even more experimental approach, as you can hear through the records of Keiji Haino or Otomo Yoshihide. But this is another story, and it will be narrated another time. Here after, some albums for you to listen in order to approach more correctly Japanese free jazz from the Sixties and Seventies.