Tori Kudo - Part 2

Q10: What is your current opinion of Keiji Haino?

(No comment).

Q11: Tell us about Mitani and the role and position he played within Maher.

I was looking for a bassist. I had heard about Mitani from Junko Shinozaki who said that she had bumped into him in Kabuki-cho¹² and that she thought he looked like Tom Verlaine. So I had imagined that he had a long neck, but when I actually got to meet him he looked more like John Cale. I first talked with him at Inkstick in Roppongi¹³ - Midori Fujisawa introduced me to him. She had told me that he really liked a song of mine called "Manson Girls"¹⁴, that he would listen to a tape of it over and over again, so he would probably be overjoyed to play bass in the band. I was playing a commercial gig at the time, so I showed up directly from work still dressed as a Turkish slave and we exchanged a couple of words. We had already played together once before at Hakkyo no Yoru in Aoyama¹⁵, when I was doing guest vocals in one of Red's groups¹⁶. I had sung a slow song called "To Alan", and he had played bass - he played it like an aggressive, fast guitar solo all the way through the song. According to Ikuro Takahashi, Mitani had just changed from playing guitar to playing bass. Much later I finally got to hear his guitar playing on the "Special Night" flexi-disk. The way he played a single-note vibrato somehow changed the embarrassment of Television into the tea-ceremony. He argued persuasively to me about the wonderfulness of Sterling Morrsion's guitar playing, and about the new direction that Richard Lloyd's "Days" pointed towards. He never once played guitar in front of me, not even in fun. At home he would always wear kimono, and imitate Chishu Ryu¹⁷. I used to like reading the evening paper that he always left in his toilet. Whenever I asked him to record something for me he'd always fill up the blank spaces on the tape with Chris Speddings' "Guitar Jamboree" or something by Steve Harley. He'd show me videos of weird films with Lou Reed in them and cable television programs presented by Peter Ivers. Every time I'd pass by Tanuki I'd see the back of Mitani and Takahashi sitting at counter. They'd be saying stuff like "I went to Ome by train", and it always reminded me of a manga called "Burai no omokage" (Shadow of a ruffian). He liked Dazai¹⁸ and said he wanted to study the Bible. He'd even read "Tapping the source" by Kem Nunn. I thought to myself that he's someone who will flirt with sin for the rest of his life. He used computers to do difficult book binding jobs. He'd first come up to Tokyo after reading that article about Kadotani¹⁹ in "Heaven"²⁰, so I think that he must have got work from those kinds of publishers. He never mentioned anything about it to me, but I think that a lot of the work he had to do was very unpleasant. He got divorced and then opened an office in Shinjuku with a friend. They called their company Bad Nice, but his partner died and Mitani got saddled with the debt. He started babbling that he was going to run off to the islands and become a fisherman. He took his mind of things by helping out a Kansai theatre company called Ishinha, so he used to go to Kansai quite often. The final gig he played with us was at Gospel. He turned into J.J.Cale that night. I gave him the Mick Farren "Playing with fire" single and he was really pleased with it. It seemed like a good way to part.

When we were recording the album Shibayama really praised Mitani's bass work. I came to realize how good he was myself after he'd stopped coming and I had to play the bass parts. The way he played bass that time we played together at Hakkyo no Yoru displayed the same self-awareness that I heard in his single-note vibrato on the flexi-disk. When he acquired that technique that always accompanies a bassist's unique type of humility, the fact that he'd had to altruistically discard many things permeated every note that he produced from his bass. While he was doing that through music, I was doing the same kind of thing in other parts of my life. When he asked me about how I compose, and I told him that I didn't write songs for myself, that I wrote songs that I thought the other members of the group would enjoy, he got depressed and told me that I was lying and that writing your own songs couldn't possibly happen that way. Then he closed his office and started doing other work outside of what he thought of music. Recently he went to Mongolia as a roadie for some band or other, and now he's living in Yokohama. I heard that he recently remarried, to the daughter of a guy who owns a bar.

Q12: What is your opinion of Hadaka no Rallizes²¹ now?

(No comment.)

Q13: What sense do you have of Mayo Thompson as a rival?

The best.

Q14: What does marriage mean to you?

Commitment.

Q15: Tell us about the origins of the name Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

If you want to know what it means, you should go to the Kiinokuniya book store in Shinjuku and read Isaiah 8:3²² from the Catholic Jerusalem Bible. It should say "speedy quick spoil booty". The prophecy contained in this name is that before a certain child is able to cry out father or mother, the King of Assyria shall make him a slave to Damascus and Sumeria, the enemies of Israel. If you were to alter the situation to that of today, I suppose it would mean something like "America and the United Nations shall destroy the Vatican". I don't want to have anything to do with either America or the Vatican, but I do have some little interest in the spoils and booty of music. I was sitting one day with a box full of sheet music in front of me and I suddenly thought, wouldn't it be less sinful if I became neither Assyria nor Sumeria itself but a ship heading from Sumeria to Assyria. I now understand that I was wrong to think that. I should have played with a band in Judea.

Q16: Could you explain in more simple terms what you meant when you described Maher's musical characteristics as "gothic country"?

A certain Russian composer said "my melodies are a sin, and chords express atonement". In the past I felt that I was able to agree with this statement. Say for example that you're listening to music on the radio, and then suddenly you hear a sweet, Only Ones-esque melody. For the duration of that song you can believe that the world can only exist the way it is at that moment, but if you were to suddenly inject some inharmonious sounds into that song in order to wipe out your own embarrassment, that act would only reveal the gap between your ego and the world. If you follow that idea further, you will become detached from the melody, looking down upon it. When I played with Che-SHIZU or A-Musik, I was aiming at getting the audience to understand the distance between me and the band. Attempting to dissect a melody or go beyond it by speeding it up - that isn't music, it's a mistaken form of penitence. I believe that kind of strained, sick view of history is based upon a mistaken understanding of harmony and polyphony. Originally religious plainsong only had the concept of singing in unison, but when the idea of polyphony and multiple melodies was developed it caused a sensation. However it also caused a heart-breaking estrangement. I believed that the idea of a bass voice singing all the way through the song developed into the substructure of Gothic music, and then eventually into the rock bass line.

However, the prevailing assumption that early music possessed only melody, with no concept of harmony is based upon very shaky evidence. Curt Sachs states that, "The deep-rooted prejudice that harmony and polyphony were special privileges granted only to the medieval and modern Western world is not logical. It is important to understand that the music that existed in the ancient western orient was very different from that which 19th century historians were prepared to recognize as music. We do not know what that ancient music sounded like, but there is ample evidence that it contained power, dignity and authority." (The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West, 1943). I think that the reason why I used the word gothic was because I believed that gothic music had stopped with Joy Division.

Q17: For the past ten years you've been playing score-based music with Maher, and also playing solo improvised piano. How do you currently view the relationship between these two?

My piano solo technique is close to the anecdote that Husymans told about cocktail piano. When you're playing cocktail piano, it's like each note has one type of liqueur attached to it, and when you press on the keys the liqueur flows out. So when you play "Moonlight serenade", it's like you're mixing up a moonlight cocktail. Or you could also look pressing on the keys as being like drawing. You find one sound or a combination of sounds that corresponds to a certain landscape or person or event, and then you press down on those keys. A piano improvisation is like an unmodulated sketch from nature. I used to worry that settling for that definition was like sitting on the fence. Through thinking about how much one understands nature, with time I became able to take the reins of myself as a performer who embraced the negative realism aspects of jazz as the representation of personal experience.

For those monthly concerts at Goodman, I would remember sunsets that I had watched that month or specific people I had met, and sketch them out in sound. There were also a couple of times when I actually got that person to sit in the grand piano while I played. They got into the piano holding a red flag and a white flag, according to a pre-arranged cue they raised and lowered the flags.

Over the course of the next two hundred years I would like to experiment with the sounds I have chosen, and then begin to think about collective improvisation.

One of my favourites of the things I played at Goodman is called "Shioyama" (Salt Mountain), a title I gave to it subsequently. All it's about is the day that I got fired from work and I went to the hot spring baths at Shioyama. The intention of the sketch was to capture the feeling of the mountains looming closer as you ride the Chuo Line out past Takao. I read a picture book by Takashi Katayama called "Yama no kaisha" that has a very similar feel to it.

Maher and the Goodman solo stuff are very different, so the audiences who come to see them are totally different too. There were always a lot of dark obsessives who seemed to come to Goodman, but they would only come for six months or so then there would be a whole new audience.

Q18: How sincere were you when you said you wanted to become a jazz pianist?

When I was child I lived in a town called Matsuyama. There was a girl there called Minori, she must have been about 26 at the time, who would take me along to see Mal Waldron or Maki Asagawa²³ whenever they played. She took me to a jazz coffee-shop called Newport. I was learning piano at the time, and she recommended that I start studying with the owner of the coffee-shop who was a pianist of the Powell school. His technique was Bud Powell all the way, and he'd even copy the same tunes. Thanks to his influence, when I was 14 I got to play piano once during the intervals at this night-club called the Night Theatre Palace that was next door to his shop. That place was like a graveyard for clapped-out singers. I mixed with all these down-at-heel musicians who'd drifted down from Tokyo, and I got them to play some blues because that was all I could play. I can't believe that I got paid for that. They all told me that I should go to study at Berkley or Julliard. On the same day the Yamashita Trio was playing a concert entitled "Frozen Days" - there had been a big poster for it at Newport. The wife of the guy who owned Newport gave me a tape which had my piano blues performance on the A-side, and a recording of the Yamashita Trio performance on the B-side. That made me feel like I'd become a star. When I was in my first year of high-school I got deeply into rock and started doing stuff like copying Syd Barrett's "No man's land". A girl called Kurita from the same year as me started to go to Newport to learn jazz piano. After she graduated she started playing regularly at clubs around Matsuyama and appearing at jazz festivals. Even now when I hear Bud Powell, I instinctively think that I've got to copy whatever he's doing.

Q19: How do you view music created from "poetic inspiration" (sweet inspiration)? Do you believe that music possesses any special power?

A gift. According to Shibayama it does.

Q20: Once, when you were still playing with Sweet Inspirations, you said that it was both strange and dangerous that music should take up the large part of your life. I believe that this statement has some link with the fact that you hardly ever perform in front of an audience now, but could you explain your thoughts on that in a little more detail.

I really like music and I enjoy playing in front of an audience, but there is a limit to the amount of time we possess. There's an scale of priority for the things that I have to do each day, and there are some days when music is far down that list. That's all that I meant - that there are certain days when I am unable to play. If you're aware that there are certain things lacking in your life, then you can alter your scale of priorities. If you don't then all you'll ever be able to listen to is hit songs.

Q21: Do you disagree with the idea of performing or singing for some compensation (for example, money)? If so, why?

I don't disagree with it. Music is a profession like any other.

Q22: What do you mean by "the equilibrium of an upside-down pyramid"?

In 2nd Chronicles, which tells of the history of the 10th century BC, there is a verse that reads, "Then songs began, and trumpets too, under the lead of the harp of David, the King of Israel." This orchestra was made up of trumpets, harps, psalteries and cymbals, and then there were 120 trumpeters. Where is says that the trumpets were "under the lead of the harp of David", I think it means that these 120 trumpets and cymbals didn't drown out the sound of David's strings, but were rather used in such a way as to complement it. That's the kind of extreme balance that I was thinking about.

Q23: At this moment in time you've finished recording Maher's first studio album and are currently mixing it. Could you tell us what were your intentions and aims as the composer? And in addition, to what extent were you able to realize those intentions? Also, could you tell us what the title "return visit to rockmass" signifies?

A revisiting of hidden reefs, and rock as a pillar of salt. Return visit to rockmass. A ship heading to Assyria from Sumeria ran aground on Cape Meisho. A year later I visited a coffee-shop called Cape, and there I observed a rocky place that looked like an old bossa nova record. Like the hero of "Le feu follet" I looked back upon my own songs and one after another they took my place and turned into pillars of salt.

Q24: Looking back now on the first Maher record (live recording of a gig in Kyoto), what do you think of it?

There aren't that many mistakes on it. Making mistakes has always been one of the characteristics of my groups. Every time I wanted to play a different chord on stage I'd have to go over to the bass player and show him where his fingers should be, then I'd turn back to the audience again to play and sing, and the next time I played a new chord I'd have to do the same thing - that was the only way I could find to play my songs. One time I wrote the chords from C to B minor on a huge sheet of paper and stuck it to the floor of the stage. To let the bassist know I was changing chords, I'd jump from one to the next like in hopscotch. Even punks laughed at us, and it got to be that all the soundmen came to hate us too. I believed that what I was doing existed on a pre-music level, and that I couldn't act like a pro and rehearse like everyone else. Playing a song in rehearsal killed it for when we had to play it on stage.We were the kind of band who had more songs than there are stars in the sky, but we could never rehearse. But then we were invited to play in Kyoto, we all felt like we were going into unexplored territory. We didn't want to make fools of ourselves in front of new people so we decided to change. We placed more emphasis on the lyrics, chose some of the more rock-like songs, accepted a lot of Shibayama's requests, came up with an effective opening sequence based on the concerts of Masaki Ueda and Ruriko Okami whom I'd see play while I was in high-school. It was Mitani's job to come up with these ideas. Then we actually went to a studio to rehearse three times. I started to think that it didn't matter if the songs died a little, as long as we looked good. Just this once. That's why that record doesn't have so many mistakes on it. But there are some songs that aren't pretty.

Q25: A lot of the lyrics that you sing with Maher seem to be based upon biblical texts. That's something I don't have any knowledge of (or interest in), but the impression I get is that there are too many thorny passages to simply ascribe to your personal study and interpretation of the Bible. How would you reply to that?

The two points that I value most about Maher is that it's the first group with which I have been able to play my own songs (properly), and write proper lyrics. As for why I use words from the Bible, that's because they are "quick, and powerful (enough to bewilder Shibayama), and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and are a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart". (Hebrews 4:12)

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Notes

¹² Very seedy entertainment area in Tokyo's Shinjuku. Full of cinemas, bars, strip clubs, sex shops, school-girl prostitutes etc.

¹³ Another entertainment area in Tokyo, this one more popular with foreigners, GIs, and those anxious to get to know them better, if only for one night.

¹⁴ Can be heard on the Guys 'n' Dolls "Hard Rock Album" LP on Metronome Records.

¹⁵ Legendary, defunct live-space set in an old SM club.

¹⁶ Red AKA Asahito Nanjo. For more details see the interview with him in Opprobrium #3.

¹⁷ Dead actor. He appeared in many of the later films by Yasujiro Ozu.

¹⁸ Japan's (dead) suicidal, romantic drunk of a writer. Beat before his time, but with a sense of humour. Much idolized by obsessive and lonely youths. Many of his books have been translated into English - "The Setting Sun", "No Longer Human", "Tsugaru", "Crackling Mountain" are some of them.

¹⁹  Michio Kadotani - according to Asahito Nanjo, Japan's only true original punk. He had an posthumous archival CD called "Rotting Telepathies" of live and bedroom stuff on PSF.

²⁰ Old alternative rock mag.

²¹ Deeply mysterious underground rock group formed in Kyoto by Takashi Mizutani in 1967. Known at the time for playing at massive volume, using a trippy light-show, and for playing on the barricades of the student revolution (eg their appearance at the legendary April '69 "Barricades a go-go" festival at Kyoto University). Their sense of mystery has been doubtless enhanced by their habit of self-releasing severely limited records which have now become preposterously expensive ("67-69 Studio and Live", "Mizutani '70/Les Rallizes Denudes '73", "'77 Live", and the video "Les Rallizes Denudes"). Mizutani played with Arthur Doyle on his first Japan tour - a CD may be forthcoming.

²²  "And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the LORD to me, Call his name Mahershalalhashbaz. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria."

²³ Dark Japanese torch-singer. One of the finest nicotine and booze-stained voices in the jazz underground. She's got a lot of records, of which the first ten or so are well worth hearing.