This Japanese Sax Polymath Might Be a Postmodern Bach

New York Times

19-03-2025

Halfway through 'Bye Bye Kipling,' Nam June Paik's mash-up of music and video graphics from 1986, the camera pans to a tenor sax player as he leaps through 'Tribute to N.J.P.' with its composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, behind him on piano, conjuring a blend of Shostakovich and Keith Jarrett.
The two musicians had joined Paik's project, which was simultaneously broadcast from New York and Tokyo, to help rebut Rudyard Kipling's line, 'East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'
The twain meets again this week, when that saxophonist, Yasuaki Shimizu, embarks on his first North American tour, starting at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Thursday and Friday, before going on to Chicago, Toronto, California and Seattle. And on Saturday, at the Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side, Shimizu will introduce four films that he scored, including 'Bye Bye Kipling.'
For a musician whose inventive arrangements of Bach and whose TV and movie scores have made him a minor celebrity in Japan, the tour is long overdue. (He last performed in the United States in the 1970s.)
A career retrospective, it should give audiences a taste of Shimizu's wide-ranging music. He has recorded some 40 albums in as many years — starting in the late 1970s with slick fusion boogie and progressive rock — and has been a prized sideman in the electronic and improvised scenes. With most of his recordings still out of print in the States, he has remained something of a cult figure here.
Shimizu, 70, described the tour plainly: 'The approach is to take a simple theme and challenge it through improvisation.' The same could be said for much of his music, from the minimalist overdubbed grooves of 'Kakashi' (1982), the album that broke him out of straight jazz and rock, to his electro-world albums in the late '80s with Martin Meissonnier and David Cunningham, which brought him attention in Europe. And then there's his Bach.
In the 1990s, Shimizu took a sharp turn into classical, adapting Bach's cello suites for tenor saxophone. With avian squawks, throaty swoops and foghorn blasts, those recordings injected some caffeine jitters into Bach's stately measurements of time. (Exactly how stately, we don't know, as Bach didn't specify bowings.)
Shimizu also arranged Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' for five saxophones (his 'Saxophonettes') and four contrabasses, starting in 2010. Various quirks of the horn, like jazzy runs and almost tropical syncopations, suggest that the instrument you choose governs the flavor of your adaptation.
With interventions, Shimizu is polite but strategic. In the 'Goldberg Variations' this shows in the 'subtle modification,' he said, of certain 'inner voices' between Bach's phrases to match the pentatonic scale, which is based on five rather than eight notes. A pillar of Japanese music 'passed down since ancient times,' Shimizu said, 'the pentatonic scale runs through my veins, like my own blood.' It's more evident in Shimizu's 'Pentatonica' (2007) and earlier electroacoustic records that might otherwise have sounded stateless.
For the cello suites, he came up with what he calls the 'Bach-Saxophone-Space relationship.' For each of the six suites, he chose a different (and dramatic) sound stage, recording the second suite, for instance, in the Oya Stone Quarry in Tochigi, where the lonely, 20-second reverb melts together Bach's trills and arpeggios as would the sustain pedal of a piano.
'What captivates me is the texture of sound,' Shimizu said, 'how it moves within a space, and my relationship with time as the sound floats through it.'
Shimizu was born in the Shizuoka Prefecture, near Mount Fuji, to a musical schoolteacher mother and a lumber worker father who led an amateur band. His childhood home, he said, was 'filled with records spanning everything from jazz to Latin, chanson to Hawaiian music,' and littered with instruments and tape machines that 'I often played with as toys.'
He is fully self-taught as a musician: 'My experiences have been my master,' he said. When his father's saxophonist called in sick one day, Shimizu, then a teenager partial to clarinet and piano, filled in on tenor, 'immediately captivated by its elegant curves.'
Invited onto Tokyo's jazz circuit, he sat in on 'incredibly moving' gigs with John Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones in 1979 and '81. (Shimizu's bebop phrasings can be heard in 'L'Automne à Pékin,' his electronic revamp of the American songbook, from 1983.) He also formed lifelong partnerships with Sakamoto (who died in 2023) and with touring regulars like the bassist Bill Laswell, who enlisted Shimizu into often raucous free improv sessions at the Shinjuku Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz club. 'He has a voice,' Laswell said in a phone interview.
In Japan, the cello suites made Shimizu's reputation. The American composer Carl Stone heard them in the shopping center by his Tokyo home, 'literally every day,' he said in a phone interview. When they finally collaborated, Stone would manipulate the microphoned horn through electronics, then reamplify it back to the saxophonist, prompting Shimizu's colorful 'duo with himself,' Stone said.
For the present tour, too, Shimizu will bring only one collaborator, Ray Kunimoto, 33, who will send his saxophone input through a cockpit of electronics, in real time, interweaving the live acoustic performance with beds of Shimizu's looped sound. They will play from Shimizu's compositions and some Bach.
This sound-on-sound method, with its exaggerated acoustic decays messing with how the duration of a piece is perceived, is a staple of his early electroacoustic work, especially 'Kakashi' and 'Music for Commercials' (1987), a buoyant, propulsive suite of micro-compositions he created as jingles for Bridgestone, Seiko and other advertisers. Shimizu likened their recording to haiku, pulling from his synthesizer 'collages of sounds and meanings.' (For that work, Daniel Lopatin, an electronic producer known as Oneohtrix Point Never, called Shimizu 'a postmodern Bach' in an email.)
Both albums are part of a wave of recent reissues. Jacob Gorchov of Palto Flats, the label that has released 'Kakashi' and an album by Shimizu's band Mariah, said 'the turning point for Japanese reissues was around 2015, 2017,' when licenses became more accessible in America and 'the floodgates opened.' He added: 'Before then, there just wasn't enough household recognition, not just for Yasuaki but for most Japanese artists.'
As a composer, Shimizu could be said to share the goal of ambient music: to behold time, rather than shape its passage. In our email correspondence, though, he seemed more playful, even adventurous, with the heady ideas he tackles. 'If one were to step outside the linear flow of time,' Shimizu asked, 'where would the mind find itself?'