A Year of Profound Originality
Processing the 1971 output of visionary percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta
What a 1971 Stomu Yamash’ta had.
The Japanese avant-garde percussionist and composer – perhaps best known to U.S. listeners for his role as leader of the 1976 art-rock collective Go with Steve Winwood – began 1971 with a recital in Tokyo Metropolitan Cultural Hall on January 11. The program included solo pieces and small-ensemble works, and reflected the twin areas of his early study: Contemporary composition (his father conducted the Kyoto Philharmonic) and jazz-adjacent improvisation (Yamash’ta studied at Juilliard and Berklee in Boston). The evening was released as two titles: The World of Stomu Yamash’ta was followed, 8 months later, by Uzu: The World of Stomu Yamash’ta 2. These are frequently cited in histories of audio recording as among the first digital recordings ever made.
Later in January, Yamash’ta collaborated with pianist Masahiko Satō on a studio recording, Metempsychosis, that unfolds as a fitful and freewheeling conversation. It’s a study in cause-and-effect crosstalk that sometimes takes on the unsettling, upside-down-world energy of experimental film.
Then in April 1971, the percussionist created a lush, intricately latticed realm of gongs and bells and percussive expressions that have few antecedents in the music world. This multi-tracked solo work, Red Buddha, offers moments of idle contemplation juxtaposed with outbreaks of agitated and interestingly varied rhythm; some pressings included a ten-page reproduction of Yamasha’ta’s score.
With its jungle-like thickets of dense sound, Red Buddha challenges the adventurous to listen differently – and to think differently about how discreet individual elements of percussion are aligned into grooves.
Just after he finished tracking Red Buddha, Yamasha’ta convened a small group of collaborators – pianist Sato, electric shamizen player Hideakira Sakurai and Takehisa Kosugi, the Fluxus composer and violist -- for what he envisioned as an all-nighter of improvisation in front of a small invited audience. This happened on April 18, 1971 at Tokyo’s Yamaha Hall; it was edited down to album length and released as Sunrise From West Sea.
Long out of print, Sunrise was reissued in March by the French label We Want Sounds. Order vinyl here.
As with Yamasha’ta’s other 1971 endeavors, Sunrise From West Sea is concerned with texture and the ways musicians can will it to mutate and metastasize over time. The four musicians each provide isolated “events” – individual plucked sounds, jabbing metallic clangs – and then listen as these resonate against the backdrops of sustained chords and enveloping drones. It’s ambient for a minute – until it's suddenly, defiantly not. There are passages that bellow up into odd repetitive vocal chants of gale-force free jazz tempests, but more often things happen in isolation; throughout, there’s a feeling of expansive space, and the musicians seem to be listening, intently, to understand what that shared space wants next.
Sunrise is a masterwork of collective exploration, the kind of document that probably should have been in print forever. Incredibly, that’s not all for Yamasha’ta in 1971: Later that year, he collaborated with drummer Morris Pert and his UK band Come To The Edge for a jazz-rock fusion project that was released in 1972 as Floating Music. This one is more accessible – it pushes toward the agitated environments of early Pink Floyd and other progressive rock bands, while retaining Yamasha’ta’s eccentric juxtapositions of sound and color. Side A shows the band in the studio; side B was recorded live at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on January 10, 1972 – exactly a year after the recital that led to The World of Stomu Yamash’ta.
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