Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

The Yomiuri newspaper is reporting (Japanese-language only) that legendary singer Asakawa Maki was found dead Sunday in a Nagoya hotel. She was 67 years old. A legendary, charismatic figure, she was the late 1960s “Queen of Underground Music.” Asakawa began appearing in Terayama Shuji’s experimental theatrical productions in 1968 and quickly became an icon of New Left culture. She released her debut album in 1970, featuring a melancholic singing style that combined jazz, blues, and chanson. Her persona coupled a cool, mysterious sexiness with searing intelligence. Asakawa always dressed in black and was usually surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke (or at least, that was the image). She continued to perform and record regularly over the decades and was in Nagoya this weekend for live appearances at a jazz club there.

R.I.P.

It’s been a hectic week since last I posted here, which in large measure is why it’s been a week since last I posted here.

The week began on a high note (and on some low notes and some sweet in-between notes): we took in Dee Alexander’s terrific concert at the Chicago Cultural Center last Thursday night. She appeared with her all-string Evolution group (violin, cello, bass and special guest sitar) and was as usual resplendent. Her summoning up of the “ancestors” on “C U On the Other Side” was particularly memorable, as was a sing-like-talking number I hadn’t heard before, a biting revenge song that I’m guess is titled “It’s Over, Supernova.”

Over the weekend, I managed to score me a swine flu vaccine: I know a man who knows a man who…. I also started watching “Hissatsu Shigonin 2009,” the latest incarnation of the cheesy samurai tv drama I’ve loved since 1985. It features Fujita Makoto as the hen-pecked Nakamura-san, a low-ranking samurai who leads a secret band of superhero ninjas who defend justice in a corrupt world. Fujita’s getting on in years, though, so he is mostly reduced to cameo appearances this time around. The central role goes now to Higashiyama Noriyuki as Watanabe-san, another low-ranking samurai who gets no respect at home. Most excellent fun, and I’ve enjoyed introducing my 13-year-old to one of J-Drama’s guiltier pleasures.

I’ve also been watching the on-going sumo tournament in Fukouka, where the biggest scandal has been the banks of empty seats — even on the opening day.

The week will end on a high note: Ray Davies appears on the Letterman Show tonight. His West Coast concerts last weekend were greeted with ecstatic reviews. The show opens with an acoustic set, and then Ray is joined by full band. After intermission, a 29-piece choir comes on stage and they proceed to turn out stunning versions of some of Ray’s best compositions, including a suite of songs from the 1968 masterpiece, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.

In other words, Ray’s been having a good week. Hope you have, too. Let me leave you with video of Ray from San Francisco last week.

The Wall Street Journal recently discovered that Tokyo is just about the best place on earth to be a jazz fan. John Kirch surveys the delights available there–the coffeeshops, the live houses, the bars– and concludes,

If jazz is America’s gift to the world, Japan is the place that knows how to unwrap it. While serious musicians and devotees fret that traditional, noncommercialized improvisation is becoming as esoteric a taste as it is in the land of its birth, jazz in all its forms still pulses through Tokyo. Sixty years after this vibrant U.S. export began to take hold, it’s piped into hotel lobbies as a marker of elegance and sophistication, blasted from dingy basement dives in unlikely neighborhoods, spun by club DJs and obsessional bar owners and hawked in innumerable specialty record shops. In Tokyo you can hear jazz of stunning, nearly offhand virtuosity played in clubs that range from among the world’s smallest to among its most expensive.

All true. Tokyo may be the best jazz city on earth, but Chicago isn’t far behind. Howard Mandel in his “Jazz Beyond Jazz” blog has anointed us America’s best jazz town.

Jazz is the lifeblood of Chicago in a way it ain’t in NYC, at least not right now. Jazz-soul-blues is Chicago’s street music. Chicago’s citizens — not just its visitors — seem to consider jazz this music their personal due. It’s what you hear at O’Hare going in and out of town.

He’s right, I think. If you want proof, just check out the amazing Hyde Park Jazz festival that will take place this coming weekend.

If a tie-breaker is needed, let me offer up this recent article from the Telegraph newspaper (UK), reaffirming the Chicago Symphony’s status as America’s best orchestra.

And did I mention the blues?

Shiina Ringo, Sanmon Gossip 「三文ゴッシップ」 (EMI, 2009). Shiina tries to merge her early noise-pop sound with her most recent jazz bent, with mixed results. She channels the Jackson 5’s “ABC” on “Rôdôsha,” and her inner Edith Piaf comes out on “Bonsai hada.” My favorite track is the rocker “Yokyô,” but there aren’t any really classic Ringo tunes here: nothing cuts straight through to your inner chaos the way her best work does. It’s still several cuts above the usual J-Pop standard, but it leaves me hoping for a return to form on her next work, either solo or with her band Tokyo Jihen.

Dee Alexander, Wild is the Wind (Blujazz, 2008). Alexander is a local Chicago jazz singer—but not for long. This CD doesn’t quite capture the marvel that is one of her live performances, but it still managed to garner a five-star review from Downbeat magazine and is now attracting lots of attention in Europe. It’s not just that she possesses remarkably true pitch: her music burns with intelligence and passion, and she explores a whole range of vocal sounds.

Black Blondie, Do You Remember Who You Wanted to Be (Black Blondie, 2009). Self-produced debut CD by a mostly female group from Minneapolis. They cross hiphop with R&B, avant-garde pop, and jazz, and end up sounding nothing like anyone else. The lead track “Hunger” is very strong (you can stream it at their MySpace page), as is the reggae-styled “Dressed to Kill a Mockingbird”; the rest of the material is uneven, but always distinctive. A group worth watching in the coming years.

Inoue Takayuki, It’s Never Too Late (Sony, 2007). Solo work by former Spiders lead guitarist, originally released back in 1981. Recorded in England, it features local session musicians, including Mick Taylor as guest on several tracks. It’s pretty standard late 1970s guitar-boogie rock, with a few instrumentals thrown in (Inoue composed the hit instrumental theme song for the 1970s television show “Taiyô ni hoero”).

Ray Davies with The Crouch End Festival Chorus, The Kinks Choral Collection (Universal, 2009). Re-recordings of a dozen Kinks’ classics given full choral treatment. It works on some of the songs quite well—“Shangri-La,” for example, as well as the suite of songs collected here as “Village Green Medley,” all taken from the classic 1968 Village Green Preservation Society album. On some of the others, I find myself wishing for a more imaginative use of the vocal resources, as well as a few more oddball song selections. How ‘bout something from Muswell Hillbillies, for example? Then again, I could listen to “You Really Got Me” played on dueling tubas and still enjoy it, and in fact it provides one of the more thoughtful uses of the choir here (though I can’t help wondering what it would have sounded like if they handed off the guitar solo to the singers and allowed them to go wild with it). The U.S. version will be released in September.

Last night, we attended the Chicago Jazz Ensemble’s fine concert at Symphony Center downtown. They played two of Duke Ellington’s major extended works, “New Orleans Suite” and “Black, Brown, and Beige.” The wondrous Regina Carter sat in on violin, and Bobbi Wilsyn handled the vocal parts. Trumpeter Jon Faddis conducted and played a couple of mighty solos, as well.

“New Orleans Suite” opened the program. It’s a wonderful, underrated series of nine songs, each of which captures a distinct aspect of New Orleans culture. I’ve loved the Ellington band’s recording of the work for many years now, but this was my first chance to see it played live. Many of the performances last night were excellent, but in fact there was a kind of awkwardness to it. The “New Orleans Suite” songs are structures meant to be filled out with improvisations, but the band seemed constrained, aiming mainly to reproduce the versions that Ellington recorded. As a result, the solos didn’t feel improvised, and the concert audience often wasn’t sure if it was supposed to clap after them. Things got better in the later numbers, though, and “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson” brought down the house.

“Black, Brown and Beige” is from the start a more symphonic work, and so it made better sense in live performance. I’m more used to Ellington’s later Mahalia Jackson revision of the work than I am to the original 1943 version played last night, so I found myself missing the stirring “Come Sunday” and “Psalms 26″ orations that bring the revised version to a stunning climax. But it was a terrific performance nonetheless, with the orchestra in excellent form. Trumpeter Art Hoyle and drummer Dana Hall in particular stood out, but everyone was brilliant. The evening closed with a nice improvised blues number with everyone taking turns, including some fun scatting by Wilsyn and Hoyle: all very loose, swinging, and fun.

The concert was actually part of the Chicago Symphony’s ongoing Dvorak Festival. Ellington does have a Dvorak link, beyond the Czech composer’s general interest in African American music. Ellington’s composition teacher, Will Marion Cook, studied with Dvorak during the latter’s American sojourn in the 1890s.

According to an old friend currently traveling there, this blog is one of the many thousands being blocked by the Chinese government during the current crackdown, all part of the paranoia surrounding the 20th anniversary of Tienanmen Square. I didn’t know how dangerous I could be.

Tonight, we’re off to Symphony Center to see Jon Faddis and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble perform two of Duke Ellington’s song cycles, “Black, Brown and Beige” and “New Orleans Suite.” “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson,” the concluding song in the latter work, is one of the sweetest pieces of music ever written by anybody. I’ll do my best not to get banned from Symphony Center.

In the meanwhile, it’s back to the office to continue writing up my chapter on 1960s Group Sounds rock and roll from Japan….

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s death. The occasion has been noted here and there, including a nice little story on NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” but Haydn had the misfortune of being both a fellow countryman and a contemporary to an even more famous composer, in whose shadow he’s had to exist ever since. As a recent AP article notes, in Austria even in Haydn’s big commemorative year, it’s still mostly Wolfgang.

“Everything is Mozart here,” said Ibrahim Erneten, who peddles concert tickets to tourists thronging the Austrian capital’s upscale Graben pedestrian zone abutting the opera house.” The tourists don’t know about Haydn.

That was certainly the case yesterday afternoon at the Chicago Symphony’s concert. The program opened with a lovely, delicate rendition of Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 (“Surprise”) under the deft direction of Bernard Labadie. But the rest of the program was all Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat (K. 456) with Benedetto Lupo on the piano, the chaconne from the opera “Idomeneo,” and Symphony No. 39 (“Prague”). The reviewer for the Chicago Tribune liked the program as much as I did, but poor Mr. Haydn….

I’m more a fan of the twentieth-century repertoire than of the classical period. But as of late I’ve been listening a good deal to Haydn’s later London symphonies. They are, of course, wonderful, complex pieces. I remember my first-grade teacher, the amazing Mrs. Morgan at Lily Lake Elementary in Stillwater, Minnesota, playing the “Surprise” symphony for us way back in 1967, explaining to her pupils the joke in the second movement. (I also remember her lecturing us on symphony hall etiquette and our incredulous reaction when she insisted that you must never cough or sneeze while the orchestra plays. What if you really, really have to sneeze, we wanted to know. You mustn’t do it, she insisted. But what if you have a cold, we persisted. If you have a cold, Mrs. Morgan ended the discussion, you do not go to the symphony. It’s stuck with me for forty-plus years.)

Then, last night, we walked up the street to the Checkerboard Lounge to hear the marvelous Dee Alexander, part of the Hyde Park Jazz Society’s regular Sunday night series. I’d seen her a couple of years ago at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, where she blew me away.

She did it again last night. Her backing trio were terrific, especially the dynamic Ernie Adams on drums, and Ms. Alexander herself was in fine voice. She has an astonishing range, not just in terms of octaves, but also in the variety of vocal sounds she commands, from guttural grunts and howls to the sweetest of bird-song trills. Her music is both keenly intelligent and fiercely passionate, a difficult combination to pull off (it’s perhaps the secret to why Mozart keeps ahead of Haydn in public estimation). Her new CD, Wild is the Wind, received a rave five-star review in Downbeat. The whole evening had the feel of watching a musician on the verge of breaking out into the international spotlight. I wonder what Chicago singer will end up playing Haydn to Ms. Alexander’s Mozart?