Editor’s note: Ayuo was kind enough to email some corrections to my review. I’ve included them inline for readers to take in.
It’s never easy to be the first in anything. Kazue Sawai’s whole career is a living testament to this with multiple convictions rendering their verdict on her choices. In 1987, she chose to help a wayward musician, one Ayuo Takahashi, trying to find himself in the then-forgotten English countryside, trying to cement yet another bridge for herself that others wouldn’t bother with.
Ayuo’s Comment:
Kazue Sawai knew nothing about me.
Yoh Hirai wanted to give Kazue Sawai a career, and he thought by reading the misleading newspaper and magazine articles, that I might become a star like Ryuichi Sakamoto. Kazue Sawai had never really performed as an improviser before she met me. My role was to find her something new.
Unfortunately, Yoh Hirai would fabricate musicians’ profiles, ask for expensive fees, lie and cheat. This did him in. A violinist named Midori took him to court for cheating her, and he lost his office and his managing career.
You may have read some of his fabrications. He would make things up if he thought he could use it to sell the musicians he managed. He was originally going to manage me but decided to manage Yuji Takahashi instead of me because Yuji Takahashi could bring me more revenue.
– via email correspondence
Making Eye To Eye, seeing eye to eye with other musicians who felt they had virgin territory to offer. So, what’s the verdict? For that you have to go back to 1959.
Back then, a young eight-year old from Kyoto began her first practice in koto playing. Studying under the tutelage of renowned traditional koto master Michio Miyagi, Kazue grew up in the same league as other koto players of that early post-war era trying to suss out where exactly what they were mastering should turn up.
Were they supposed to stay within the traditional, Hogaku repertory? They saw their increasingly dwindling numbers be lured to the “cooler”, freer spirit of more contemporary schools teaching non-traditional instruments. Before anyone had an inkling she’d become this giant, influential koto master, back then Kazue would ask those questions. Kazue would experiment on her own time with pieces “foreign” to the instrument, with technique that tried to take the koto out of centuries of tradition. In a short time she became proficient in the various strung versions of the koto (13-, and 17-string) out of a necessity to branch out from the past.
Three years into her collegiate studies at Tokyo’s University of the Arts she married another gifted koto student, one Tadao Sawai, who didn’t come from any prestigious school and who could have short-circuited her own aspirations (as was commonly pressured in that era’s society). Luckily for both, they saw eye to eye on the direction koto stewardship was heading and they both decided to promote a new koto music with a newer more contemporary idea on culture.
In the beginning, Kazue played a background role, trying to be supportive of Tadao’s career aspirations but also trying to figure out how to stitch in her own investigations in other realms like classical, experimental, and non-traditional music. It wouldn’t be until 1979 that Kazue felt compelled to mark her own territory — first with orchestrated koto recitals and then reimaginings of classical pieces into koto strictures. When she convinced Tadao to help her start the Sawai Sokyoku Institute, a whole new school for koto students was born, opening the door for those ideas she always had to be expanded upon by herself and others.
For a moment the elder Takahashi, Yuji Takahashi, became an inspiration for this fourth way to take traditional Japanese instruments. Kazue developed ways to adapt pieces by Cage, Toru Takemitsu, and perform with others like Sumire Yoshihara pushing the boundaries of contemporary Japanese music. Then, after winning countless awards for her playing and coming into her own as a composer herself, somehow, in the mid ‘80s, after a concert in England she received an invitation from a familiar name.
Ayuo’s Comment:
Kazue Sawai wanted to establish her own career apart from her husband, Tadao Sawai, and her first major step was an extensive tour of Japan with Toshi Ichiyanagi and Sumire Yoshiwara, as The Triangle Music Tour.
Toshi Ichiyanagi is a very well-known and established figure in the Japanese classical music world. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music in NYC from 1954, where he met and studied composition with John Cage. He married Yoko Ono in 1956, and the two of them were responsible for introducing John Cage and making Avant-Garde performances in Tokyo in the early 1960s. I was born at this time, and both my parents were friends with Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono. Yuji Takahashi was still around 21 -22, around the time I was born, and did not have a career yet. He heard much about John Cage and the NY music scene from this couple.
Toshi Ichiyanagi introduced Kazue Sawai to John Cage’s music and encouraged her to perform Contemporary classical music. These days, Toshi Ichiyanagi organizes classical music concerts and composes operas and symphonies.
There is a company in Tokyo that produces art exhibitions called Art Front Produce. In the early 1980s, an ex-employee of a record label, Camerata, Yoh Hirai was hired to run a music division of this company. Yoh Hirai began by managing Yoshihara Sumire and Kazue Sawai.
In 1985, articles about me were all over in most of the major newspapers and magazines. Midi spent a great deal of money at first, but the promotion was misleading. They wrote that I was the next Ryuichi Sakamoto. Yoh Hirai must have been deceived by these advertisements because he called me up and asked if I could compose a composition for the Koto. Later, he asked me to produce a CD for Kazue Sawai.
– via email correspondence
Somewhere in Bath, Ayuo during the sessions for his Nova Carmina had come to a realization: “traditional Japanese instruments recorded in Japan always sounded harsh”. He felt technology had expanded far enough to present a different brush stroke for what people considered was the Japanese musical palette. If Kazue would be obliged to help, he wanted her to play compositions that could show what it was capable of sonically and spiritually. Perhaps seeing some of her in him, Kazue agreed to head over to David Lord’s studio and help Ayuo and another friend (one-time pop star Hiromi Ohta) who had found a way to transition her voice to the folk idiom.
Ayuo would introduce Kazue to the world of English and European folk music. Ayue would compose the vast majority of the music in Eye To Eye. But Kazue would truly use her hands to bring to life all the wonderful melange of ideas that tap into Ayuo’s own history — of being this self-aware Japanese, Japanese outsider that afforded him the ability to trek in directions others neglected to explore.
Aided by many of the same supporting cast from Nova Carmina, notably Peter Hammill, Sarah Jane, and a new one, Guy Evans, ex-Van der Graaf Generator (to name a few), on songs like “When I Was Eight” they start to cross boundaries that fallen leaves from ancient trees and grass had blown over, joining universal songs from instruments like the zither, psaltery and eras (medieval, pre-classical) traversing areas where that nebulous struck string was less “eastern” and “western”.
Perhaps on songs like “They Set On Two Bamboo Stools And Gazed At The Moon And Its Reflection In The Lake” and “A Song To Fallen Blossoms” these seasoned vets felt the spirit of another generation trying to find their footing in that imaginable new world. There, longform storytelling, highly indebted to the olde English script, takes new phrases with this cast. Likewise, ex-Incredible String Band founding member Robin Williamson contributes a gorgeous song, “A Letter From A Stranger’s Childhood”, originally meant for Celtic harp and fiddle, transformed through Kazue’s 17-string koto as something with its own air of mystery.
Proving that both were on the same frequency, certain songs like Ayuo’s “Eye To Eye” blur the line even further. Here on a Sequential Circuits Prophet 2000 sampler, Ayuo takes a sampled bit of Kazue’s playing, twisting and mutating it through all sorts of sonic tools, to provide an atmosphere that belongs to no school but theirs.
Ayuo’s Comment:
I did not use a sampler on this track. Everything was played live.
The only sampler used on this CD is on “They Set On Two Bamboo Stools And Gazed At The Moon And Its Reflection In The Lake”.There is an augmented chord sampled from Mahler’s fourth symphony and a sample of a Cello and Contrabass playing in octaves. That is all. I use some synth pad on the track, “Eye To Eye”.
– via email correspondence
Hiromi Ohta once again shines vocally, providing an expert course in chorale singing that gets even more special once Ayuo joins in harmony.
A truly special album ends bookending such a forward-thinking track with two fascinating improvisations. One “Midare”, an adaptation of one of Japan’s oldest koto songs by its original teacher Yatsuhashi Kengyo, shows how far its newest, very wayward acolyte has taken it. Then, as if to thank Ayuo for the opportunity to cross this bridge into his generation’s music, Kazue reinterprets a track originally written by Ayuo’s dad for her (closer, “While I Was Crossing The Bridge”) and makes it his to take forward, now. Stunning, in its own way, so ends this album built on the convocation and conviction that they must finish this sojourn together.