Yasuaki Shimizu, a Japanese Sax Master, Takes North America

Invited onto Tokyo’s jazz circuit, he sat in on “extremely transferring” gigs with John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones in 1979 and ’81. (Shimizu’s bebop phrasings will be heard in “L’Automne à Pékin,” his digital revamp of the American songbook, from 1983.) He additionally shaped lifelong partnerships with Sakamoto (who died in 2023) and with touring regulars just like the bassist Invoice Laswell, who enlisted Shimizu into typically raucous free improv periods on the Shinjuku Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz membership. “He has a voice,” Laswell mentioned in a cellphone interview.

In Japan, the cello suites made Shimizu’s repute. The American composer Carl Stone heard them within the procuring heart by his Tokyo dwelling, “actually on daily basis,” he mentioned in a cellphone interview. After they lastly collaborated, Stone would manipulate the microphoned horn by way of electronics, then reamplify it again to the saxophonist, prompting Shimizu’s colourful “duo with himself,” Stone mentioned.

For the current tour, too, Shimizu will convey just one collaborator, Ray Kunimoto, 33, who will ship his saxophone enter by way of a cockpit of electronics, in actual time, interweaving the reside acoustic efficiency with beds of Shimizu’s looped sound. They may play from Shimizu’s compositions and a few Bach.

This sound-on-sound technique, with its exaggerated acoustic decays messing with how the period of a piece is perceived, is a staple of his early electroacoustic work, particularly “Kakashi” and “Music for Commercials” (1987), a buoyant, propulsive suite of micro-compositions he created as jingles for Bridgestone, Seiko and different advertisers. Shimizu likened their recording to haiku, pulling from his synthesizer “collages of sounds and meanings.” (For that work, Daniel Lopatin, an digital producer often known as Oneohtrix Level By no means, referred to as Shimizu “a postmodern Bach” in an e-mail.)

Each albums are a part of a wave of current reissues. Jacob Gorchov of Palto Flats, the label that has launched “Kakashi” and an album by Shimizu’s band Mariah, mentioned “the turning level for Japanese reissues was round 2015, 2017,” when licenses turned extra accessible in America and “the floodgates opened.” He added: “Earlier than then, there simply wasn’t sufficient family recognition, not only for Yasuaki however for many Japanese artists.”

As a composer, Shimizu might be mentioned to share the objective of ambient music: to behold time, fairly than form its passage. In our e-mail correspondence, although, he appeared extra playful, even adventurous, with the heady concepts he tackles. “If one had been to step exterior the linear stream of time,” Shimizu requested, “the place would the thoughts discover itself?”