•
Rating:
April 13, 1612: the samurais Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro clash in a duel on the beach of Funajima, a small Japanese island located off the port of Shimonoseki, halfway through that narrow stretch of sea between the major islands of Honshu and Kyushu. Musashi strikes his opponent dead, catching him in a fatal moment of distraction and confirming his formidable fame as an unsurpassed warrior, as well as the greatest swordsman that the Land of the Rising Sun had ever known. From that day, the island is also known as Ganryujima in perpetual memory of the defeated hero, whose nickname was indeed "Ganryu." The event carries an extremely high symbolic significance and belongs to the collective memory of the Japanese people, who assign it the value of an epic clash between opposites, akin to what the mythical duel between Hector and Achilles represents for Westerners; surrounded by a partial and suggestive aura of mystery that nevertheless leaves no doubt about the historical veracity of what has been passed down, the battle between Musashi and Kojiro rightfully enters the list of epochal events in the history of modern Japan and as such has been immortalized multiple times over the centuries in exquisite testimonies of Japanese visual art.
November 23, 1984: drawing ideal inspiration from that epic battle and reworking it into musical forms, two musicians (an American and a Japanese) meet at Radio City Studios in New York and, over the course of a single inspired session, record a magnificent manifesto of intercultural cooperation, a luminous (and disconcerting) expression of a poetics of synthesis between East and West, inherently unclassifiable and intolerant of the most canonical musical geographies. A chapter of history in its own right, with neither a "before" nor an "after," in fact resembling only itself, the product of the unrepeatable and yet spontaneous, natural harmony of two "excellent" intellects, albeit very different in their excellence: one a young proponent of an unclassifiable "free-form" avant-garde only partially attributable to jazz and its improvisational criteria, the other confined (but only apparently) in the immutable continuity of a centuries-old tradition and, by its very nature, a declared enemy of heterodoxy, of the "exception to the rule"; a tradition engaged in repeating itself in the ideal cyclicality of fixed schemes, tested stylistic formulas against the backdrop of a precise "horizon of expectation" that everyone, more or less consciously, expects to be confirmed and respected; all traditional-popular cultures, not just the Japanese one that concerns us more closely here, move along similar paths, leaving very little room for the interpretative subjectivity of the individual performer, who is instead methodical and rigorous in interpreting crystallized stylistic frameworks.
The two musicians in question, as you may have already guessed from glancing at the owners of the work in question, are John Zorn and Sato Michihiro, but in this context, defining them merely as "musicians" (in the sense of "instrument players") might seem reductive: more than anything else, they are the illustrious spokespersons of two viewpoints corresponding to as many visions of a musical "matter" that is neutral, unique, and universal; John Zorn himself, not coincidentally, likes to emphasize (borrowing certain concepts from Noam Chomsky's linguistic theory) how the distinctions between genres and their relative categories are nothing more than accessory attributes of what is the "surface structure" of music, while all music, regardless of its stylistic and historical-geographical placement, maintains points of mutual contact in terms of "deep structure"; according to Zorn, only a musician capable of grasping connections at the level of deep structure is able to express a musical discourse that is coherently "avant-garde," in the most literal sense of the term. It follows that observing the forms of music from such a perspective means above all being able to embrace multiple experiences from the high ground of an enviable "totalizing" approach, without boundaries or limitations of any kind, far from a strictly (and traditionally) "puristic" approach.
In "Ganryu Island," therefore, the interesting insights suggested by the Japanese tradition are updated, dynamized, removed from their staticity by the unusual fusion with contemporary avant-garde elements; but for it to be possible to realize a project that until then was valid only on paper, it was necessary to recover many of the timbral peculiarities that, even unconsciously, the Western listener is led to associate with that tradition: in such an optic is framed the decisive contribution of a personality that is on the frontier, but still well-rooted in the musical scene of his home country, like Sato Michihiro, master and impeccable player of the "shamisen". This term, perhaps enigmatic to many, refers to a Japanese three-stringed instrument with a very elongated neck and a round, often snakeskin-covered body; a symbol of Japanese musical culture, it is actually Japanese only by adoption, as it is believed to originate from Central Asia and was nonetheless imported from China (this is historically proven) only between the 15th and 16th centuries. Widely used in the "kabuki" theater, learning its playing technique was a subject of study for aspiring "geishas," who used it for entertainment purposes. The peculiarity of this instrument lies in the fact that it has both a "melodic" and a more precisely "percussive" soul (I would say complementary); it can be played by plucking the strings as one would a double bass, but also by striking the pick (which the Japanese call "bachi") against the soundboard.
Significant is the fact that Michihiro, among the leading contemporary performers of the "shamisen," was at that time experimenting with a new playing technique in which a large space was given to stylistic elements ("patterns" in technical jargon) of Jazz origin, borrowed from the improvisational techniques of certain Afro-American musical culture: it is not uncommon, in the album in question, to hear the "shamisen" engaged in navigating between harmonic passages typical of Blues and modal Jazz, within the context of a deeply "moody" improvisation where very little is planned in advance. The timbral variety of a John Zorn interested in exploring especially the high registers of sax and clarinet stands out in the listening, with particular preference for difficult, dissonant, sharp, bizarre sounds, capable of insinuating themselves as a muffled and prolonged lament among Michihiro's phrasings. However, the general atmosphere is far from being coldly academic, as everywhere one breathes the lightness, the veiled self-irony of an informal, confidential duet; in this self-ironic and anti-intellectualist approach are inserted the curious sound-voices inserted here and there by Zorn: meows, chirps, trills, hilarious grumbles of "Zappa-like" memory. And significant in this singular chapter of a disruptive poetics of creativity is the role attributed to silences, pauses, suspensions, "dead times" that are a constitutive part of the narrative.
It's a difficult album, challenging, absolutely requiring the listener's patience. Not recommended for fans of Rock or even more classic Jazz, they would struggle to finish listening even to the first track on the list. Nevertheless, an experiment of great ambition and courage, to which I unreservedly assign four stars.
Loading comments slowly
