The Tokyo Concert Experience

  Years ago, when I was new to Japan, I remember seeing this display at the Shibuya Tower Records that held my attention. The cover of one of the albums being advertised was a faded black and white picture of a man wearing a dark suede sports jacket. His detached expression and the wide-eyed naked mannequin in front of him added to the quirkiness. It was definitely intriguing. Some time after that an even more intriguing one, this time as a full-on new release, depicted on its cover the artist as a skeleton playing a steel guitar. I didn’t explore his music even then. It wasn’t until a friend of mine recommended the artist’s former band, Yura Yura Teikoku that I finally caught up. Their garage psychedelic brand of music was right up my alley.  Little did I know that for his solo output Shintaro Sakamoto went the complete opposite direction. He ditched the fuzz pedal and replaced it with a cleaner sound akin to yacht rock or AOR, (hence the covers!). The music was not less fas...

  The void left by the absence of live shows in the last year has been filled by quite a few music related movies released in the past few months. The biggest one, by far, being David Byrne’s American Utopia. The Spike Lee directed movie didn’t disappoint. The build-up from the relatively austere opener until the full band reveal with Talking Heads’ I Zimbra , was electrifying and a reminder of the power of the live music experience. Another word to describe this feeling is magic, which is the name of the annual event curated by Peter Barakan. Since 2014 Barakan has assembled each year an eclectic program of artists outside the mainstream from around the world. The sadly departed Gurrumul came to the second edition in 2015. Other artists that have been part of the festival over the years are Dayme Arocena, Joe Bataan, Arto Lindsay, Omar Sosa, 3MA, Tamikrest and Flor de Toloache . You can find reviews of the headlining shows outside the festival for the last two on this blog. The s...

  Anything to be said about the concert experience in 2020 will be an understatement and will resonate as obvious. It is also pedantic to complain about not being able to enjoy live music in light of all this pandemic has taken from us. For me it made me reminisce and appreciate even more the chances I had to witness some of my favorite artists in the past and in a couple of the handful chances I had to attend shows this year, live music reminded me of the transformative and transcendental nature of art. Lots of cancellations and plans that didn’t come to fruition. There was no Fuji Rock the year. I had tickets to see Tangerine Dream in June, the rapper JID in the same month, Brujeria and Pig Destroyer in March, a performance by the Butoh group Dairakudakan in March, The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Nott performing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Helmut Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied in July and Big Thief first scheduled for May, later postponed to March 2...

God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be is the title of a late seventies album by Sun Ra. That is quite a statement as well. I’ve always been a fan of those artists in touch with the Mystic, like Sun Ra, John and Alice Coltrane, Santana, Ravi Shankar, Terry Riley, among others. It seems obvious to me that music elevates spirit and mind and can serve as a conduit to reach what’s beyond ourselves. Connecting with the universal structure. The Creator has a Master Plan… Through his works, Johann Sebastian Bach reached mystical transcendence several times. St. Matthew Passion is perhaps the quintessential spiritual work of art. This was the piece that I witnessed in my return to live music after an almost five months pause due to the pandemic. I didn’t think this concert would happen. It was supposed to take place on April 10th, Good Friday, but it was postponed to August 3rd. I thought it was going to be cancelled like most of my other scheduled concerts were, but then I got an email saying t...

This week the government decided to lift the national emergency status, which means that slowly -hopefully- things will be getting back to normal. Concerts are, I think, included in the last part of the step by step plan designed by the government to open the economy. In the meantime I don’t think there will be any shows in the horizon. Surprisingly there are a few big events, all happening during the third week of September. Thrash Domination, the recently announced Trooper Entertainment anniversary festival and Summer Sonic. Time will tell if those are happening. Fuji Rock, as it now, it's still scheduled for late August. Back in 2017, during the second half of the year, I attended the Fuji Rock Festival for the first time and it was quite an experience. Of the three editions that I’ve been to, this one was my favorite. On the first day I saw Japanese electronic artist De De Mouse and R&B artist Gallant , both at the huge tent that’s the Red Stage. At Field of Heaven I...

Going to concerts, experiencing live music, the once in a lifetime interpretation of a recording or a score, or improvisation in front of an audience. Those are the moments that this blog intended to document. The current global pandemic changed that and there’s no way of knowing when that experience will return as it was until recently. Before the crisis hit this blog was averaging three posts a month. The last show I went to was on March 11th and there’s been nothing but cancellations and postponements since then. I thought it’ll be a good idea to look back on some of the concerts I attended before starting this blog. The first show I wrote about was a Terry Riley one in November of 2017 , so I decided to briefly write about the ones I went to that year and post some pictures as well. In January of 2017 I saw two legendary jazz artists. First I saw Hermeto Pascoal on the 7th at WWW Shibuya. I remember the show started with his entire band around a microphone with shakers a...

The coronavirus is real. There’s no question about it. This pandemic is a world health crisis and serious measures need to be taken to control the spread. The media plays a crucial role when it comes to alerting and keeping the population informed. Having said that, there’s one phrase that keeps popping in my mind whenever I watch the news. It’s the title of one of my favorite movies. Fear eats the soul. “Kowai” in Japanese means ‘scary’ and it’s one adjective, like ‘delicious’ or ‘cute’, that is used a lot in Japanese. Not just for truly scary stuff but literally it could be for anything. Honestly speaking, the overuse of that word is something that I find rather off-putting. You can imagine how that sentiment is being exploited by the news shows. In the last couple of days music venues and live shows in general have been the main focus. In Osaka a few music venues have been confirmed as transmission sites, as several cases have been reported to spread from those places. Concer...