Remembering Hiroshima, in a Farewell Performance
October 21, 2003
By BEN RATLIFF
Toshiko Akiyoshi has worked hard and efficaciously with her
big band since 1973. Not just in the larger sense of
creating lots of compositions, but also in the specific
sense of what she does onstage: she leaps up to conduct
with imposing authority, then steals over to her piano
bench to improvise, usually in a hard-driving show of lean,
stabbing harmony and long bebop lines.
She is 73, and her intent is to focus more on her piano
playing. So while she conceived the performance on Friday
at Carnegie Hall as a three-decade retrospective of
big-band compositions, she also said it would be her last
ever with the group, and appeared to mean it. (Though she
did qualify that by saying "in a concert-hall situation.")
It will be a loss. She has absorbed the most useful and
least composer-specific aspects from the work of Thad
Jones, Mel Lewis, Ellington (late period) and Ralph Burns,
and worked them into an incredibly engaging style: lots of
chordal motion, lots of contrastic melody parts, sections
to spotlight specific members of her band, open space for
robust, swinging trio interaction, and - her stock-in-trade
- lots of cross-cultural references. As one of the very few
women notably leading large-ensemble bands, and certainly
the only Japanese woman leading a world-famous band playing
only original compositions, she has never tried to play
down who she is and what she's up against; her honest,
entirely nonglib way of combining jazz with elements of
Japanese and Asian culture testifies to her success.
With the exception of "After Mr. Teng," an up-tempo piece
featuring Frank Wess on tenor saxophone, the first half was
overweighed toward ballads. Still, her ballads are rich and
mature; some of them, like "Children of the Universe" and
"Glass Ceiling," recalled the poignant colors of the great
pieces Burns wrote for Woody Herman's band in the 1940's.
But "Hiroshima Rising From the Abyss," a recent, ambitious,
suite-length work taking up most of the concert's second
half, was the focus of the evening. Ms. Akiyoshi was raised
in Manchuria in a Japanese family that returned to Japan in
1946; perhaps those facts of her biography gave her the
necessary critical distance to write a piece about the
bombing.
The performance showed what one wishes for in long-form
jazz composition but too rarely gets: a composer's accurate
appraisal of her best strengths. It involved word: short
statements from diaries of Hiroshima survivors, read by Ms.
Akiyoshi's daughter, Monday Michiru.
There was some tone-painting: the bomb blast itself,
represented by a short, angry cacophony. There was room for
gorgeous soloing. And over some ominous but quite beautiful
sections of quiet, clashing long tones - distant sirens,
perhaps - there was the raspy but beautiful sound of a
Korean flute, played by Won Jung-Hyun, sitting to the side
of the orchestra.
The band's principal soloist, Lew Tabackin - he is also Ms.
Akiyoshi's husband - improvised beautifully in his little
section of the piece, as he had done all evening. There are
few other tenor saxophonists who can deliver his kind of
top-to-bottom exploration of the horn and constant play of
contrasting solo ideas, with arresting interval shapes and
unfolding moods; he made long solos justify themselves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/ar...a26c1da3fc7823
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