Michiko Akao: Yokobue (1983)

I’m afraid people might get the wrong impression when they listen to the opening track from Michiko Akao’s Yokobue. What’s there to say about “般若波羅蜜多 – Prajna Paramita”? Manning the iconic transverse flute of Japan, the yokobue, Michiko creates a dark jazz funk piece that somehow manages to mix a vocoder in, in a way that sounds positively moody and meditative at once. For six minutes, accompanied by unnamed session musicians, Michiko shows her mastery at bringing this centuries-old instrument into a contemporary light. However, as you’ll hear, the rest of Yokobue remains just as vivid, in its own different way.

Some songs drift into ambient folk ruminations, other touch on some deep prog, yet others explode with full arrangements that immediately fight for your attention. Based on a Zen Buddhist spiritual-influenced approach, the A-side is the more productive side, toying with jazz, fusion, New Age, and heavier sonics to meet Michiko’s goal of modernizing the yokobue sound. The flip side then appears reductive, reducing all its songs to nearly skeletal arrangements where Michiko’s yokobue sounds positively personal and meditative. Both equally enthralling, Yokobue balances itself out by immersing you in the star of the show: her yokobue.

Michiko Akao originally began her artistic career as a piano player. In the late ‘70s most of her work consisted of composing music for TV shows on NHK. However, the more she went into composition the more she felt alienated from her own cultural influence. Seeking to find that, she went deep into researching Japanese folk music. It was one piece composed on the yokobue, the Japanese transverse flute, that shook her and made her pick up this instrument, at an older age. Studying its technique, writing pieces for it, and seeking to experiment with it, brought her immediately to light as an artist that could be welcomed in the classic field and these others field in jazz, minimalism, and modern composition, that more traditional players struggled to get into.

Much like Midori Takada, Michiko saw the power inherent in traditional music heard in Noh drama and Kabuki theater. That element of dynamism, shifting moods throughout a piece, can be woven into whatever new music and territory she wanted to explore with the yokobue. While she would perform on stage in traditional garb, in the studio her tastes originally ran towards extremes.

On one side you had her love for Japanese show music and the other it’s her love of jazz and technology. On 1981’s Kazamai <Wind Dance>, we have something that could be measured as the Japanese answer to Bobbi Humphrey’s own Mizell Brothers-led production. Here you have one of the leading lights of Japanese folk music creating funk, disco, and mood music that would absolutely work less without the presence of her flute.

Able to work in front of the flute, just as well as the opening of it, allowed Michiko to draw a larger audience. On her final album for Toshiba, she went for a more experimental, ruminative sound. Drawing from New Age electronics and modal jazz, Michiko introduced an edge to her music. Officially two suites: Suite “Prajna Paramita” and Suite “Take No Sonofu”, as stated earlier each side would explore different sides of a cohesive hole. We can already infer the first from listening to “Prajna Paramita”, but let’s focus on the second suite, as this post winds down.

“序曲 Prelude” signals the shift. There the slippery jazz funk basslines of the prior songs seem to mutate into the mysterious melodic yokobue composition Michiko presents as a mood piece to prepare you for the much more minimalist side. The octave ranging melodics of “竹植うる日 Take Uuru Hi” present full drama with merely flute as an actor. Volume peaks and valleys show the full range of emotion Michiko could draw from her flutes on “竹植うる日 Take Uuru Hi”. “竹の華 Take No Hana (Bamboo Blossom)” reaffirms the role the yokobue plays in the “dance” section of the Japanese folk tradition, sinewing its way to its conclusion. The album then knocks you back into the present, with “終曲 Finale” combining the floating sonics underlying many of these albums songs and Michiko’s heart wrenching sostenuto flute playing. Like every great drama, Yokobue just knows when to end it.

“In Japan, it is thought that all people have the flute, or the flute sound, somewhere inside them. I can draw on this internal feeling and use it musically. Even people who do not have a cultural understanding of the music respond to the flute. In Berlin, for instance, the audience picked up the fact that I was invoking aspects of nature. These people certainly did not have a pre-defined cultural identification with the music, so something must be happening that transcends the basic notion of the music.”

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