Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

The Vision Festival, Sam Rivers Live in Japan 1964, & Kazuko Shiraishi Regarding the Future

Posted by Jean Downey on June 9, 2006


On June 14, at its Vision Festival in New York, Arts for Art, a non-profit “devoted to the arts as a borderless, multi-disciplinary terrain where all things are possible,” is honoring jazz musician Sam Rivers with a lifetime achievement award:

The importance of Sam Rivers to the community of musicians who comprise the Vision Festival cannot be overstressed. In addition to being an essential musical inspiration as a composer and improviser, Rivers exerted a profound influence on avantJazz through his role as an artist/organizer in the 1970s. Rivers' loft space Studio RivBea (opened in 1970 with his late wife Beatrice) was one of the primary launching pads for the New York loft scene.

Like other lofts such as Studio WE and Studio WIS, RivBea provided an essential meeting point for adventurous musicians. The self-empowered approach towards presenting art and music that arose in this atmosphere continues to inform the work of many musicians to this day.

The Vision Festival's salute to Rivers on June 14 will celebrate his life and music through and evening of performances.

This spring, Rivers, now an octogenarian, and his RivBea jazz orchestra released their latest CD, "Aurora" – gorgeous blasts of rich dense, atonal layers fused with stunning improvisational solos.

Rivers came from a musical family, was classically trained at Boston Conservatory, and played with legendary musicians - including Billie Holiday, T-Bone Walker, and Cecil Taylor. I love his multiple virtuosity, his interstitial flexibility, his incredible energy, and humanity.

In 1964, Rivers toured Japan – Tokyo and Kyoto, and maybe one other city – with Miles Davis. Rivers adding his intense punch to Davis' cooler, mellower bent. They recorded a live concert, "Miles in Tokyo."

1964 signaled the beginning of popularizing Asian culture throughout the world. It was the year of the Tokyo Olympics, the first year a martial art, judo, was a part of the competitions. The first major demonstration of Asian martial arts – a karate tournament at Long Beach, California – took place in the United States. Trappist monk Thomas Merton met Zen master D.T. Suzuki.

1964 was also a year of painful costs and wins for global human rights. Ku Klux Klan members murdered civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in Mississippi. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Law, landmark legislation finally outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Originally created to protect the rights of African-American men, the bill was amended prior to passage to protect the civil rights of everyone, including women for the first time. The apartheid government in South Africa executed political activist and performing artist Vuyisile Mini, a beautiful man who had turned to sabotage in the struggle to liberate his homeland. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. became the youngest recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech on December 11, he said that for the world to survive, our moral, spiritual, and creative life must become as valued as the technical and material realm that dominate our existence.

Music and other arts have always been huge and not fully acknowledged sources of emotional and moral energy for global human rights struggles. Blues, jazz, and rock bridged Black and White cultures in the United States and helped set the stage for the American Civil Rights movement. Music, with powerful spiritual overtones, fueled the South African movement against apartheid, and set the stage for the new nation when the 1994 anthem combined the old official anthem with the unofficial anti-apartheid anthem. This anthem, maybe the most beautiful national anthem in the world, is a multilingual and multicultural prayer for understanding and peace set to music. Arts, especially visual and performing arts, created an alternative space for resistance against decades of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.

There is something about the arts that nurtures the human longing for freedom and liberation. I always saw jazz as one of the transcendent forces of expression and freedom in Japan, especially during prewar and postwar Japan.

By Rivers’ and Davis’ 1964 tour, jazz was at a peak in Japan. Theolonius Monk had toured there the year before. Tokyo of the 1960's was dotted with numerous tiny clubs frequented by jazz cognoscenti. Homegrown avant-garde jazz pioneered by Japanese musicians, such as Takayanagi "Jojo" Masayuki exhibited uncompromising individualistic creativity. Improvisational musician Yoshihide Otomo pays tribute to his influence in his essay on creatively coming of age in the era of jazz kisa.

However, jazz had taken hold in Japan long before the 1960's boom period, arriving with the jazz age of the 1920’s. Japan’s fascist government (as did the Nazi government, and later China's Maoist government ) attempted to ban jazz, but they were only able to force it underground. Jun Ichikawa's wonderful 2004 "Tony Takitani," features a Japanese musician who keeps playing jazz through this period and during the postwar period, when jazz erupted again throughout Japan.

Musician and ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz in Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity asserts that by embodying an aesthetic of inclusiveness that incorporates “any and all outside elements,” jazz becomes a way for individuals to express multiple identities and empower themselves through a unifying “utopian universalism.”

E. Taylor Atkins' academically informed Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan and William Minor's musically informed Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within both tell how jazz, African-European musical fusion, amalgamated into Japanese and cross-Pacific forms. Both writers challenge the "Japanese as imitators" stereotype.

During a period of decline for jazz during when stadium rock and top forty radio dominated American popular culture, devoted Japanese connoisseurs, especially in Tokyo, a global jazz center, kept the industry alive. Minor quotes Blue Note Records producer Michael Cuscuna, "Japan almost single-handedly kept the jazz record business going during the late 1970s."

With prose that evoke the worlds within worlds of jazz clubs in Japan, Minor writes in Jazz Journeys:

Recently returned from a second trip to Japan, I was sitting at the kitchen table late at night, sipping sake, leafing through photos of Kiyomizudera and Kinkakuji temples in Kyoto, the bright orange buildings of the Heian Jingu Shrine, the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) and sacred shika (deer) in Nara – and photos taken at two Tokyo jazz spots: J Club and Pit Inn.

A feeling of serenity came over me. Sudden and unsought, the way the Zen masters say it's supposed to come. Don't worry. No overlarge claim of satori or enlightenment here. Just a nice sense, as I listened to Masao Yagi play "'Round Midnight," of general well-being. Yagi recorded an album of tunes by Thelonious Monk in 1960.

The Japanese liked them so much they brought over the real thing, and Monk in return recorded a popular Japanese song, Ko Jo No Tsuki: "Moon Over the Desolate Castle"--which the Gene Krupa Trio had also recorded in 1952, along with Sho, Sho, Shojoji, "Badger's Party," a children's song. A contemporary San Francisco artist named Miya Masaoka has recently recorded "Moon Over the Desolate Castle" and "'Round Midnight" on the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument made from two pieces of paulownia wood shaped like a crouching dragon.

Small world? Indeed...

I discovered that jazz life in Japan, ironically, was infinitely more complex than that in "Russia." Because of ethnic and cultural diversity, tracing "roots" to the music or influences in the former Soviet Union was relatively easy (pianist Aziza Mustafa-Zadeh, from Azerbaijan, merging traditional folk modes, or mugam, with jazz, for example), but the effects of assimilation and influence in Japan are much more subtle, even evasive.

I had joked with friends that, given the geographical demands, the spatial dimensions of the former Soviet Union and the tendency there for people to think on a grand War and Peace scale, I should – by contrast – when writing on Japan, reduce my findings to a haiku.

But the subject of jazz in Japan (and Japanese jazz outside of Japan) proved far too expansive for a 5-7-5 syllable format.

Reading these words brought home a thought I have had for years – that most creative activity in Japan is complex and hidden. Music and theater in Japan is subtle and veiled, in corners and side streets – live music in tiny clubs, little theaters, shoebox size spaces, hinterland artist communities, and village film festivals. So much is submerged, only known and followed by tiny subcultures of cognoscenti.

And maybe not only in Japan. Perhaps much of the world’s creativity percolates in the interstices, in the depths, and on the margins.

So much of the world's creative energy and expressivity happens underneath the radar of the mainstream because there’s only so much this lens can follow, given its standardized field of vision, without the ability to plumb surfaces, missing peripheral views.

For decades, people have raised fears about the bogeyman of globalized standardized commercial “culture,” mowing down diverse, local, and small culture. However, the opposite is happening. Small presses. Small music labels. Independent films. Poetry readings. Collaborations between genres. All are flourishing. And often connect loosely at the transnational level.

In 1976, the year Japan ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Sam Rivers collaborated with Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi
on her album, "Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane."

Vancouver-born, Japanese resident Shiraishi is one of Japan's most striking contemporary poets. She experienced a dislocated childhood, returning to Japan with her family right before World War II, thereby escaping Canada's concentration camps, but falling into Japan's heavy-metal militaristic regime. Growing up in violent wartime repression powerfully shaped Shiraishi’s worldview.

She wrote her first book of poetry at age seventeen, just as the exhaustion of postwar Tokyo was beginning to lift. She published her first book, The Town that Rains Eggs, at twenty. Joining a poetry circle led by surrealist poet Katsue Kitazono, she began reading her unique poetry aloud in the 1960's, and collaborated in poetry evenings with Beat poet Allan Ginsberg and Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, whose works she also translated. She has read at international poetry festivals throughout the world and her poems have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her latest book, My Floating Mother, City, published in Tokyo in January, 2003, received rave reviews.

Shiraishi’s poetry reflects a wide range of temperament and feeling, imaging both humanity's affirmative and destructive tendencies, repeatedly questioning what our future holds, juxtaposing visions of contrasting peaceful and apocalyptic futures, in "Regarding the Future The Donkey."

Last year Shiraishi collaborated with her daughter, Yuko Shiraishi, a London-based visual artist, and other artists in an installation at Nijo Castle for "Kyoto Art Walk", an installation at Nijo Castle. They put their installation in the kitchen, a normally hidden place:

The samurai culture has two contrasting characters. One is the public face and the other is private, it shows in the architecture of Nijojo castle. The public face is seen in the large screen painting rooms, for many numbers of people. The private side is tea ceremony room. The kitchen symbolises domestic life, like the back stage of the theatre. So I rather look at the kitchen to see the history. Not Tokugawa history but more the human history.

The project will be an installation in the Kitchen of the castle, which will include a series of three-dimensional mirrored boxes of various sizes resting on the floor. Leading from the top of each box up to the ceiling beams above will be a taught line of string or thread. The installation will be accompanied by a soundtrack that will include the Sounds of nature, kitchens, and poetry. The poetry in the soundtrack will be collaboration with the poet Kazuko Shiraishi.

Curator Yamamoto Shinji described the installation:

Through this encounter, we think that something more universal and more sacred can be rediscovered. Among the selected spaces, there are Saigyo-an, the Palace Kitchen of Nijo Castle, Kyodo (Sutra Hall) and Joju-In of Kiyomizu Temple which are not normally open to the public. Viewers will have a wonderful opportunity to step into the deeper part of Kyoto's traditional spaces.

I'm still listening to Sam Rivers' new CD, "Aurora," named for the visible atmospheric phenomena that is created when clouds of solar particles crash into the earth's atmosphere. This happens all the time but we can only see it in arctic latitudes when it's dark. Luminous arcs, filaments, and streamers are moving all over our skies all the time.

I thought perhaps this is how multicultural diasporic flows of the creative energies move around our world. So much is happening that we don't see because of our limited fields of vision.

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