Sept. 21: Tokyo

Took the Shinkansen to Tokyo after checking out, massacring a bento along the way (maybe it wasn’t fresh enough: everything kept falling apart), and it wasn’t such a big deal until I got there and realized that this one didn’t go to Shinjuku, but, rather, to Tokyo Station itself. Damn, I knew the hotel (the Aoyama President) wasn’t far from Shinjuku (actually it was, but not as far as from Tokyo), but the driver was good and aggressive and whisked me along at a good pace, nightmare traffic notwithstanding. Got to the hotel and found a message and a stack of guidebooks from Calton Bolick, and a fax from Noda-san telling me that Evan Parker (whom he spelled “Perker”) was due to play tonight with Otomo and Sachiko and a guy playing the sho, which sounded interesting. I took a walk down Aoyama-dori, the big street near the hotel, to get my bearings, then came back and talked to Calton for a while, and left a message for Noda, and made plans to go to see if ol’ Evan really was a perker.

He was. I’m so used to the sterile, airless improvisation of German musicians (and, to be honest, some of the ’60s and ’70s British stuff I’ve heard) that this really got to me. Parker is no virtuoso in the commonly-accepted sense of the term, but he’s an extraordinary listener. The show was at the Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz landmark for over 20 years, and although the vibe was weird (before they let me take a seat, I had to hand in a ticket for my free drink, even though I didn’t feel like one at the moment), the seats were okay and there were actual sightlines and all. Parker started out solo, circular-breathing his way through a number which started out like bagpipes, but soon picked up on the “accidental” overtones produced by his “bad” fingering and blowing. Thus, the rhythmic underpinning remained the same while the texture kept changing.

Next up was the duet with Ishikawa Ko, the sho player. The sho is often shorthanded as a “Japanese harmonica,” which doesn’t really get it. It’s a collection of bamboo tubes bound together, each with a reed inside which sounds when the player opens or covers one or more of a number of holes on the front of the instrument. It’s essential to gagaku, the highest form of court music. Ko did a great job of listening to Parker, who gingerly essayed legato phrases, feeling his way around Ko’s cluster of notes -- not exactly a chord in the Western sense -- while Ko made his instrument behave in some rather non-traditional, but nonetheless very musical, ways.

Sachiko was up next, and I must admit, I still have trouble with what she does because it’s so minimal. Parker was up to it, playing high-pitched squeals, overblowing at the top of his range, and finding ways to create beats against the sine tones she was producing. She really doesn’t seem to use much variation in pitch or deal with rhythm at all, but he seemed to be forcing her to get a little busier with her machine, and in the end it, too, was a worthwhile performance, albeit a bit shorter than the other two.

Next in the box was Otomo, who started out by hitting some Tibetan temple bells and taking the tones they produced and making feedback from them, while Parker circled those notes with another of those legato explorations. Eventually, they hit on a common ground and once again the duo took off, as Otomo began putting a contact mike around the bells, then making a tuning-fork interact with them while Parker stayed right with it, commenting on the timbres, pitches, and tones. It was a wonderful show of communication.

I was, however, dubious about how the quartet setting he’d announced for the second half of the show would work. The two guys sitting next to me, a Brit named Simon and an American named Steve, were talking about the whole thing, Simon being a major Parker fan who said he’d seen him about 100 times. (Oddly, but appropriately for this sort of improv, he didn’t own many of his CDs). Steve was a total virgin to this whole scene, and it was interesting to see how someone who was such a deep fan tried to explain what it was to someone who was open to it, but without many reference-points. I was feeling them out about the difference between improv and jazz, and it was all quite a fine intellectual exercise, and enlightening in that I’d never met anyone who was so much into this sort of stuff before.

But the quartet was amazing. Parker started off solo, very quiet, then Ko breathed softly into the sho, Sachiko hit the occasional note, and Otomo picked up a guitar (which I find he plays regularly in what Simon described as a “kick-ass post-bop band”) and produced some bell-like tones by picking below the bridge. This provoked kind of a trio between Ko, Parker, and Sachiko, who weaved in and out of their long-held notes, as Otomo went back to the bells, finding similarites between their sonorities and those he’d been producing on the guitar. He then did some blocks of fairly normal rock-guitar feedback, which encouraged the others, and things got so intense -- yet without any high volume -- that I just stopped taking notes. Everybody was listening to everybody, and that included the audience, which was as hushed as I’ve ever heard in a club. There was one point where Otomo squeezed the last bits of sound out of a feedback loop, making it go uh-uh-uh, and Parker was right on top of him, doing the same with the sax. There was another point where it would have been perfect to stop; Parker had taken the sax out of his mouth and Ko had stopped playing, but Otomo started firing up again and I was afraid that this would get tedious because it would go on too long. Not to worry: although it only was another five or so minutes, it all held together, and finally once again it landed. The whole thing had lasted about 45 minutes. The audience wouldn’t stop clapping, so they came out and did a short encore, which actually got Sachiko going wild and playing a lot of notes! She then did a fast blip and everyone stopped.

I was awed, and I talked with Simon and Steve for a while, then noticed that Noda-san was standing at the bar, so I asked him if he were hungry and he agreed that he was. But instead of leaving, he went over to the organizer and asked him if Parker would like to go to have a meal after the show. In fact, Parker would like to do just that, as it transpired, and we endured the usual post-gig windup, as they broke down the equipment, and finally Parker, the woman he was with, Sachiko and Otomo, the organizer, and another guy I didn’t recognize, all went to this funky soba place Noda knew about deep in gayest Shinjuku, which was the first time I’d seen any gay stuff happening in Japan. There were tater-tots made of mountain potato with nori or shiso leaf on them, then tempura shrimp, then tempura melon, then soba of various kinds, although Noda opted for miso soup with a kind of local noodle called houto.

Afterwards, we tried to deal with the taxi situation, and I found a guy who drove like a maniac back to the hotel. Slept very, very well.