The performers: Kevin McHugh from the US on piano, Hugues Vincent from France on cello, as well as an Australian clarinet player, and Japanese cello and flute players and a drummer.
The venue: Nanahari – “seven needles”, ä¸ƒé‡ – a small basement in Hachobori, east Tokyo, in an authentically Showa-era building. We are partly transported into another time – the bubble era, echoes of it.
The audience: 10-15 people. Each of us brings something there: hopes and fears, personal histories, wine.
The context: up north, Fukushima seems to be having as deep problems as ever. Governments and companies over the world are embroiled in surveillance scandals and financial problems that seem to be piling higher year by year. The economic outlook in many places, and certainly Japan, is highly uncertain. The Japanese population is aging. For foreigners whose occupation is something unorthodox like music, getting a visa to stay in Japan is not trivial. In the middle east, conflicts are raging with no end in sight.
And yet. Here and now, these musicians from four countries manage to synthesise something that could have been done nowhere else and at no other time. The format is free jazz, one of the least restricted forms of music. McHugh and Vincent probe their instruments – piano and cello – deeply. McHugh dissects the piano and begins adjusting and interfering with its strings and other innards while playing, as he is wont to do. Vincent displays an intimacy and energy with his cello that is almost frightening. One fears what he might be capable of. Through the unorthodox playing, their instruments receive lobotomies, massages and savagery that allow them to produce soundscapes one must suspect they were never designed for. Yet in the hands of capable musicians like these, the result is plausible, amazing and profoundly unique.
The evening goes on for a few hours; various combinations of the present musicians (drawn by lottery) improvise together. The result is sometimes theatre, sometimes pure aesthetics, sometimes metaphysical. There are confrontations and compromises. Something is unconcealed; veils are lifted off. Intensely true and genuine narratives blend to form new and unique stories. The evening’s performances are one justification, one redemption of the mad state of the world today. And on some level, perhaps proof that the madness is not complete, that something healthy and vital is still alive, expressing itself.
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