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$21.99 CDx2
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TEIJI ITO
Music for Maya
(Tzadik)
"Lights Along the Way - India"
"Maeva"
Teiji Ito's Music for Maya is the third in Tzadik's ongoing series of releases by this Japanese composer and collects his early compositions for films. Ito was married to avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren from the late fifties until her death in 1961 and this two-disc collection focuses primarily on this period of Ito's life. Ito and Deren shared a deep connection to shamanic traditions of the world, in particular the voudoun (voodoo) tradition of Haiti, but Ito also found himself welcomed into ceremonial rites in Japan, Nepal and Native America. The scores to Deren's most well-known films, Meshes of the Afternoon and The Very Eye of Night are collected here, as well as scores for several films by Marie Menken, Willard Maas, John Korty, and a UN documentary about Asia called, Lights Along the Way. The fact that the UN approached Ito to score films about the Far East is, in a way, unsurprising, given his pan-ethnic conception of music and fluency with instruments and rhythms from all over the globe. A truly gifted multi-instrumentalist, flutes, banjo, flamenco guitar, cello, voice, clarinet, santour, Japanese drone reeds, Indonesian gamelan instruments, and an ever-present battery of drums from the world over all make showings here, and somehow, in Ito's hands, these disparate instruments -- reluctant bedfellows in terms of origin, let alone tuning systems -- all seem like natural elements of a single, great vocabulary.
These early pieces (the earliest, "The Very Eye of Night," dates from 1952, when Ito was just 17) presage the remarkable, metaphysical synthesis of Ito's 1964 masterpiece, Tenno, but the makings are all there; Ito's prescient approach to tape composition is already quite well-formed here, as these pieces find him overdubbing himself playing a dizzying array of instruments to great effect, often using one instrument to complete or punctuate a phrase started by another. The beginnings of Ito's interest in the tape recorder as an instrument can be detected in the sudden disparate juxtapositions of tone and sound quality that tape made possible, and more ostensibly in the brief, but completely insane, tone generator and tape manipulation piece, "Operation Hourglass - Diesel Engine." In other places, manipulated tapes serve as counterpoint to overdubbed wind ensembles, exotic percussion miniatures, and gypsy guitars. Being that these pieces were composed for such a wide variety of contexts, Music for Maya is full of different moods and dimensions. An austere Asian minimalism that will be familiar to fans of Tenno presides over much of the first disc, but there is great variety amongst the remaining pieces, many of which find Ito embracing a playful mix of jazz, flamenco, and world rhythms. Another (sizeable) piece of the Teiji Ito puzzle. Highly recommended. [CC] |
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