Once a member of the world famous Kodo drummers of Japan, Kaoru Watanabe now splits his time between playing and teaching at various western institutions, focusing on Taiko drumming and the many forms of fue, or bamboo flute. Tatsuya Nakatani is another in the lineage of forward-looking percussionists who are exploring the many ways that stretched membranes can be made to sound. I had the good fortune of seeing him play a few years ago and though I thought I knew a lot about drumming, he showed me a thing or three. The music that these two make lies in the regions where eastern and western musical traditions conspire, and shake hands with the spirit of avant garde. This is by no means a new endeavor; indeed many ensembles past and present have searched in these areas. Henry Kaiser, Charles K. Noyes and Sang Won Park's famous Invite the Sprit is perhaps the most obvious example, but the Far East Side Band and various ensembles formed by the late Don Cherry also spring to mind.
The opening piece "Taikyo" gives us an atmospheric, perhaps even weatherly, pairing of bamboo flute with bowed metals and low-end rumble and thump. At first it is difficult to tell that there is more than one sound source, so closely matched are the overtones. "Escapism" is much more lively, with flute running quickly through various modes while Nakatani does the quick-quick in the vein of Lytton, Lovens or Oxley, but with his own style. The stops and starts are spot-on, and Watanabe returns occasionally to a theme of sorts, consisting of a fast repeated phrase. "Yume" features a very western classical sounding melody with dark percussive interjections and punctuation, and "Amaterasu" continues in the same vein. "Kikyuu" has lots of scrubbing and scraping alongside flute trill and that odd, hollow breath sound so common to bamboo pipes.
The long title track stands out: it's as if all the pieces preceding it are demonstrational prologue, displaying the myriad ways in which these two groups of instruments (air column and vibrating surface) may be combined while borrowing from and enhancing the traditions they inhabit. Here Watanabe leans much more heavily toward western improvisational ideas, focusing on sound more than melody. The interaction is more even, less lead-instrument-with accompaniment than earlier on the disc. Watanabe uses more vocal sounds mixed in with his notes, and plays with his timbre quite a bit more. The form is episodic with frequent explosions of sound, very edge-of-the-seat stuff. It points to ways in which different world musical traditions could be brought together by combining different ways of thinking about what music is and does, causing sparks to fly from the attitudes rubbing against each other.
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