Review: Sakamoto Brings the Noise

If you find yourself in possession of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s new album Out of Noise, here’s my advice: Get on a train.

A deluxe edition of Out of Noise is being released in the US by Decca (dropping 28 September) with a companion CD, Playing the Piano, which came out last year. Playing the Piano contains a dozen solo piano versions of earlier Sakamoto compositions (“self-covers,” he calls them, including themes from The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and The Sheltering Sky) performed by Sakamoto himself. Despite a bit of banging and pounding here and there, it’s all pretty easy on the ears.

Out of Noise is another matter. The new disc also features a dozen tracks, all exploring the hazy area where noise morphs into music, and music disintegrates into noise.

All of which makes Out of Noise more of a challenge for the ear. I don’t think I helped myself much by loading both Playing the Piano and Out of Noise onto my iPod and attempting to listen to both at a go. Playing the Piano ends with Bolerish, from the soundtrack of Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale. Out of Noise opens with hibari, a solo piano piece as peaceably formal, at first, as anything on Playing the Piano. But soon the rhythm seems to stutter and notes begin to enter the chords at odd angles. After an hour of flowing melody, I found myself in choppy waters and wanting to crawl ashore.

Out of Noise is a different experience taken on its own terms, something I discovered by chance a few weeks ago on the 7:30 train from Seattle to Portland. As we clicked through a foggy landscape of back yards and parking lots and blurring trees, I started hibari and found it transformed into a meditation exercise. Indeed, “meditation exercise” seems like the best way to describe Out of Noise, one that has the world around us as it’s object.

A few of the tracks feel formally composed. hwit and still life feature the pristine bowing of early music group Fretwork, and to stanford is another solo piano composition, but most feel more like soundscapes where human elements (guitars, voices, etc) are more likely emerge and recede. The most affecting of these, glacier, incorporates recordings of Sakamoto’s 2008 trip to Greenland with Cape Farewell’s Disko Bay climate change research expedition. Sakamoto has involved himself in ecological issues in recent years and it’s hard not to feel, especially in this piece, a painful sense of the climate we know and depend on melting away.

[Here's a video of glacier, complete with climate change factoids]

Curiously, a neighbor's barking dog or a passing truck fit into the flow of this music in a way they wouldn't in a Haydn symphony or even a Philip Glass arpeggio fest. (The first time through firewater I had to pause it to make sure that the barking I heard was indeed the cocker spaniel down the street. Later, I almost missed the pooch.)

It’s inspiring to see a master like Sakamoto continue to stretch himself with new challenges and new collaborators like Christian Fennesz, Keigo Oyamada, multi-instrumentalist Skuli Sverrisson. That said, Sakamoto the composer, Sakamoto the ordering intelligence, is who emerges through all the noise.

Not everything works, at least for me. The track in the red includes samples of human voices--most prominently an older black man’s saying things like, “I just feel like, you know...” and “...a little lost, but...” against a gently pulsing background of ambient noise and a keyboard. Sadly, the intent here is too obvious and isn’t taken far enough. It’s hard not to hear an echo of Primitive Radio Gods’ more overt Phone Booth. Likewise, the Reichian jibber jabber of composition 0919, which closes the album, sounds like something one robot would create to annoy another robot and made me want to break plates, and not in the happy Greek way. Strange too, that minimalism should feel like such a throwback at this point.

It’s also inspiring to see Sakamoto sticking to the album concept for Out of Noise, with the separate pieces arranged deliberately and flowing on a set course. It’s inspiring to see any artist do that, although it also feels quixotic to do so in the track-skipping musical landscape we live in. Yet another climate to be saved.

Review: Willie and Wynton and the boys

The gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt made only one tour of the United States. He spent three weeks in November 1946 on the road with Duke Ellington's band, performing for the first time in Cleveland before making stops in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh before returning to New York for two shows at Carnegie Hall (or almost two - the famously erratic Reinhardt ran into an acquaintance on his way to the concert hall and instead spent two hours at a cafe instead).

The tour was at best a moderate success. (Check out Paul Vernon Chester's account in which he reports that Reinhardt was shocked to discover that Ellington and the members of his band wore underpants of a floral design - although he made sure to picked some up for himself before returning to Europe). Only one obscure recording of the show in Chicago documents their performance chemistry. Still, the event remains on the short list of shows that most jazz fans would have given their right arms to have seen.

I thought of Duke and Django's American adventure last year when I happened on a review of a concert featuring Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Jazz purists will rattle their dentures at the comparison, but the echoes are there: Nelson, while no gyspy virtuoso, shares Reinhardt's instinctual approach to music and love of swing and the standards that populate much of the jazz songbook. Marsalis, for his part, has made no secret of his desire to inherit Duke the mantle of as both a composer (and snazzy dresser). And I'd have given my right arm to have seen this show.

When the shaggy country star joined the elegantly tailored jazz czar on stage in New York in January 2007, they came together on a program of music from the genre where both styles meet: the blues. The evening apparently got off to a rough start, but five songs in Marsalis's band (drummer Ali Jackson, bassist Carlos Enriquez, pianist Dan Nimmer and saxman Walter Blanding) and Nelson finally found their groove.

That groove is what's on display in the new Blue Note release "Two Men with the Blues," which drops officially on July 8. Nelson is clearly the visiting team here (he gets moral support from his longtime harmonica player, the awesome Mickey Raphael) but he's almost like Jackie Chan's character in the Drunken Master movies in that it's precisely his idiosyncratic (and at times just plain off-kilter) approach that becomes his strength. Marsalis and his men are clearly enjoying the challenge of adapting to the bearded outlaw's at times Zen-like disregard for the beat. On "Stardust" in particular, he's at times so far and so comfortably off the beat that you can feel the rest of the band trying to adjust. The result is kind of a group moonwalk with Willie in the lead.

All this disorder leads to some really fresh and engaging solo work form Marsalis, who I often find a little too calculating in his approach. His vocals on "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" and "Ain't Nobody's Business" are also a treat. The setting also allows the jazz roots of Nelson's guitar solo technique, always laying there latent, to come to the fore. (As a footnote, the recording also makes clear how integral Mickey Raphael's harmonica is to the Willie Nelson sound. His presence on the band stand is as understated as ever but just as tightly wound into the larger context.)

The essential pleasure of "Two Men with the Blues" is listening to this meeting of city and country styles as the players work it out. It's actually less of a concert than an especially productive jam session. I'll dare to hope that they both Wynton and Willie carve some time out of their rampant touring schedules to see what else they might be able to come up with. And if not, we'll always have this one night in New York to remember.

Free download
Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis - Bright Lights, Big City (mp3)

Linkage
www.willieandwynton.com