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$31.99 CD/DVD
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KAZUO IMAI TRIO
Blood
(Doubt Music)
 "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway"
"So in Love"
Doubt Music, one of Japan's most promising experimental music labels of recent vintage, issue one of their most extraordinary releases yet. Blood is a trio recording and DVD by guitarist Kazuo Imai, Manabu Suzuki on electronics and motion sensors and, perhaps the trio's secret weapon, Atsuhiro Ito on the Optron, an instrument of his own invention which is essentially a large fluorescent light fixure, complete with bulb, fitted with a pickup and played and amplified like a guitar. I saw Ito perform a solo Optron set at the Kitchen last year and was blown away by the variety of artistic contexts his performance provides. Playing in near darkness, the Optron's light is as bright as the instrument's roaring, buzzing sonic textures are loud, and with a variety of guitar pedals, Ito adds, subtracts, and manipulates the instrument's deceptively simple frequencies into a far more complex beast than one would imagine possible. On this trio recording, Ito is placed in a new, more subtle setting -- a live-in-the-studio performance, also filmed and included on the DVD, during which the group performs and improvises around a set of songs by Annette Peacock (one of the first female pioneers of early synthesizer technology in a jazz setting), Thelonius Monk, George Brassens, Cole Porter, and Bach! Not your typical Japanoise record, then.
Imai's guitar playing is sensitive, nuanced, and thoughtful; he has the task of providing the most recognizable melodic meat to the tunes' skeletal arrangements, while Ito and Suzuki are able to dance, flutter, and pummel around the body of the repertoire in an improvisational fashion. Suzuki's electronics often sound like anarchy in a pachinko parlor, or a Nintendo gone haywire; there are times, as evidenced on the DVD, which provides wonderful context as to how these extraordinary sounds are formed and sculpted, where Suzuki controls his tools via motion sensors in a Theremin style as Ito's Optron
flutters tickertapes of light shards across the room. This isn't an easy listen by any means -- in fact, it's probably the most "difficult" album I've heard all year despite it actually being rather quiet in its menace -- but it demands your attention and deserves to be heard; it provides new context to old tunes whose re-evaluation lifeline often seems near its end. Somehow, these three adventurers completely resuscitate the material for a set that will hopefully change the landscape and put some fire under jazz's cold, noodly ass. It's fantastic. [IQ] |
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