Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music

About Japanese Jazz, with special reference to Makoto Ozone: I believe it to be quite a common opinion, that which sustains that the “Japanese approach” to jazz is more technical than expressive. It’s wrong. First of all because those opinions are not based on a comprehensive study of Japanese musicians, but on the analysis of the work of those Japanese musicians who actually made it in Europe and America. So that opinion about Japanese jazz musicians says a lot more about the contemporary taste for Jazz in Europe and America than it says about Japanese Jazz performers. In any case that can be said about most of the jazz being performed nowadays anywhere. Truly expressive jazz performers are an exception in Japan as much as they will be anywhere else. The first Japanese jazz musician I had the chance to hear was Makoto Ozone, a relative contemporary of Brad Mehldau. I was shocked at his amazingly fluid, refreshing, spontaneous touch and his lovely improvisational skills. It was as if the devastating self-consciousness and stylish-hat-trick awareness that so badly affect contemporary jazz pianist was unknown to him. He might not have the variety of influences, the Satie-eske delicacy and expansive repertoire (including Radiohead covers) that Mehldau has (though in my opinion all these qualities play occasionally badly against him as they frequently make his already quite overcooked discourse more apparent) and the He’s not the kind of pianist that will torture your brain and disturb your appreciations of jazz classics with intricate re-harmonisations and textural and melodic discrepancies as Bill Evans did in the mid-to-late fifties, and stands away from the originality of Monk and the sheer power of McCoy Tyner. However, this comparison would only be fair had Ozone been around when most of the above mentioned talents flourished (Ozone was born in the 60’s). I personally have him as one of my favourite pianists, whose charm, wit, expressivity and ambition took him away from the piano first (he had an affair with synths, but I have not heard any of it) and from music altogether; being a popular figure in Japan, he started hosting a TV program. His return to the piano was celebrated in the jazz world, and it included collaborations with Gary Burton, Chick Korea (in a recording of Mozart’s E flat concerto for two pianos) and a hommage to Oscar Peterson. Near the end of the century, he finished a piano concerto, which I haven’t heard either but I do know that it was premiered in Mexico and it included a 70 piece orchestra. I wish I could remember the names of the other players, but he was also part of an extremely successful jazz trio. In their later stuff they attempted, as other contemporary jazz groups, to “redefine the boundaries of music” and put together elements of Bossanova, Tango, modern classics, etc. For those who think (like me) that the highly respected (to the verge of idolatry) pianist Barenboim’s account of Jazz, Bossanova and Tango are a crime against humanity that deserves the most severely outlawed punishment preceded by medieval tortures that made the sickest, radicalised practitioners of the inquisition shiver with horror, will find Ozone’s stylistic openness mildly inoffensive and occasionally pleasing.

Japanese Music