The Squid's Ear Magazine


Imai, Kazuo / Roger Turner: Molecules [2 CDs] (Ftarri)

Caught live at Bar Isshee in Tokyo, Japan in 2017, the duo of Kazuo Imai (nylon string guitar) and Roger Turner (snare drum, tom tom, cymbals, metal & wood) present two distinct sets, each one on a separate CD, the first using open but continuous playing of great control and precision, the second a more unpredictable and assertive set of unorthodox interplay.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Roger Turner-snare drum, tom tom, cymbals, metal, wood

Kazuo Imai-nylon string guitar


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Label: Ftarri
Catalog ID: ftarri-983
Squidco Product Code: 26166

Format: 2 CDs
Condition: New
Released: 2018
Country: Japan
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded live at Bar Isshee, in Tokyo, Japan, on October 11th, 2017, by Shingo Matsuoka.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"This masterful performance was born of the meeting of two master improvisers, Kazuo Imai of Japan and Roger Turner of the UK. Imai, who studied with Masayuki Takayanagi and Takehisa Kosugi, is one of Japan's leading improvisers and guitarists. Turner is a drummer and percussionist who has been actively performing throughout the world since the beginning of the 1970s. His Japan tour in October 2017 included concerts with Japanese musicians in various locations, including his performance with Kazuo Imai at Bar Isshee in Tokyo on October 11. In this duo concert, Imai played one nylon string guitar, while Turner used only snare drum, tom tom, cymbals, metal and wood instead of setting up a complete drum set; and the sound was acoustic, without electric amplification. The overall sound is somewhat controlled, in keeping with the nylon string guitar volume; and within that context the musicians' interacting sounds are remarkably diverse, dynamic, and beautiful. The concert's first set (Disc 1, 32 minutes) and second set (Disc 2, 36 minutes) are documented in their entirety on this album."-Ftarri



"Three discs (well, four actually) [1 | 2 | 3] of duet improvisations, each involving a Japanese musician playing with a European musician. [...] a meeting of Kazuo Imai (nylon string guitar) and Roger Turner (snare drum, tom tom, cymbals, metal, wood) [...] recorded in Japan. The music is long enough for a single CD (in total sixty-eight minutes), but as Roger Turner said they were so different sets that night in Tokyo, he wanted to separate discs. This is the world of more regular improvisation. Silence is not something they allow very much. Not in either set, that is.

Of the two, the first one is the most conventional in terms of improvisation. The guitar is tortured in a mild way, no chords are played, just a very free range of sounds and something similar can be said of Turner's drum. It rattles about and it sounds very solid. Fragmented playing that is, but solid in its execution.

On the second disc everything is bit more heavy. There is much controlled aggression going on here, unleashed upon those instruments. Turner picks occasionally up a bow and treats his cymbals with much vigour, while Imai hits those strings with a similar attack. [...]"-Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly


Get additional information at Vital Weekly

Artist Biographies

"Roger Turner (born 1946, Whitstable, England) is an English jazz percussionist. He plays the drumset, drums, and various percussion, and was brought up into the jazz and visual art cultures inhabited by his older brothers, playing drums from childhood in informal jazz contexts.

Turner studied English literature and contemporary philosophy at Sussex University, playing with Chris Biscoe for the British Council in 1968, a first concert in improvisation. His move to London gave him contact with the first and second generation improvisers and he began to play primarily with Lol Coxhill, Gary Todd, John Russell, Hugh Davies, Steve Beresford, and Phil Minton.

In the years immediately after 1974 his work was primarily concentrated on opening the way to a more personal percussion language. This was also a period of intense collaborations that structured many of his future approaches to music-making and saw the formation of two long-lasting acoustic duos with Phil Minton and with John Russell. Recordings of these duos document an extreme attention to timbre and pitch, as well as a constantly shifting speed that typified much of his work at the time. The duo with Minton toured extensively throughout Europe, USA and Canada.

In 1979 he established CAW records with John Russell and Anthony Wood, and recorded the solo album The Blur Between focussing on single surface improvisations: a linear and reduced equipment approach he had started using with Carlos Zingaro and others in live performances.

In addition to forming Trump music with Gary Todd to promote improvised music in London, he also involved himself in formative activities of the London Musicians Collective during this period. He was awarded Arts Council of Great Britain bursaries for solo percussion in 1980, and in 1983 for investigation into percussion with electronics. Extensive festival and club solo work followed, including the Bracknell Jazz Festival and the Brussels Festival of Percussion.

In 1982 the trio The Recedents was formed with Lol Coxhill and Mike Cooper exploring the possibilities of electro-acoustic music, in which Turner initially played drumset and EMS Synthi A as a means of bending the sounds of various metal percussion instruments. This group, still existing, mixes song, jazz, punk/thrash, with acoustic detail in always shifting sonorities, and has worked throughout Europe, Canada and the UK, also recording for the French Nato label. Involvements with experimental rock musics and open-form song included extensive work in duo with Annette Peacock 1983-5, with whom he toured in Europe and Scandinavia. They recorded the album I have no feelings for Ironic.

In 1984-5, he was invited for workshop residences at Alan Silva's Institute Art Culture Perception in Paris, where long-term collaborations with Alan began, culminating in The Tradition Trio with Johannes Bauer. This group was central to his explorations of forms of free jazz, an interest that has seen him working with musicians on both sides of the Atlantic (including Elton Dean, Irene Schweizer, Cecil Taylor, Roy Campbell, Henry Grimes, The Wardrobe Trio and Charles Gayle).

Since the early 1980s his work has focussed on numerous projects with improvising musicians and groups, touring Europe, Australia, USA and Canada. Perhaps the most important of the later groups would be Konk Pack, formed in 1997, with Tim Hodgkinson and Thomas Lehn, a group whose use of volume and sense of detail continues the exploration of an electro-acoustic dynamic that forms one of his main musical concerns. This group has toured extensively in Europe and USA.

He forged working relationships with Japanese musicians over the years: in the 1980s with Toshinori Kondo in the trio with John Russell, but since the mid-1990s in concerts and recordings with guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi in Austria, Japan, and U.K, and in the recent (2009) Hana-Bi three-day event in London that included the guitarist and the pianist Chino Shuichi.

An active involvement in visual art has always been in dialogue with his music, and an inspiration for it. In the forefront of this is his work with Susan Turcot (the investigation/documentation of music and sound-drawing both in Europe and Canada-including the Being Rich box collection --, and music for her 2008 animation film Bitumen, Blood, and the Carbon Climb.

His music for dance/performance includes work with Alexander Frangenheim's Concepts of Doing, Stuttgart ; Carlos Zingaro's Encontros projects in Lisbon and Macau; and most recently in the Josef Nadj production etc.etc. (premiered Vandeouvre, France, 2008) and which is a continuing involvement.

In March 2009 he was invited to travel and perform on the Arctic island Svalbard, and was also invited to attend and play in the Comprovise event in Cologne, Germany in June 2009, set up to examine any possible relationship between improvisation and composition.

Turner's music-making with international improvisers in ad hoc and group collaborations have since the 1970s to the present day included Toshinori Kondo, Derek Bailey, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, William Parker, Cecil Taylor, Otomo Yoshihide, Shelley Hirsch, Joelle Leandre, Keith Rowe, Ab Baars, Barry Guy, Barre Philips, Henry Grimes, Paul Rutherford, Gunter Christmann, Marilyn Crispell, Irene Schweizer, Frederik Rzewski, and Malcolm Goldstein."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Turner_(musician))
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Kazuo Imai (今井 和雄 Imai Kazuo, born September 24, 1955) is a Tokyo-based guitarist who plays in a rigorous and original free improvisation idiom. His music joins the rigour and texture of contemporary classical with the passion of free jazz. He has played with many Western and Japanese improvisers, including Lee Konitz, Barre Phillips, Arthur Doyle, Han Bennink, Irene Schweizer, Shuichi Chino, Tetsu Saitoh and Kazue Sawai. In addition to playing solo and in collaborations, Imai is also a member of the important collective improvisation group Marginal Consort. As well as guitar, Imai also plays viola da gamba.

Born in Kawasaki in 1955, Imai studied with two of post-war Japan's leading musical iconoclasts, Takehisa Kosugi and Masayuki Takayanagi. Imai studied under Kosugi at the Bigakko art school from 1975, and as a graduation project he participated in the East Bionic Symphonia collective improvisation performance and recording. Kosugi invited Imai to play with his well-known mixed media group Taj Mahal Travellers, which he did from 1975 to 1977. Imai also studied under guitar virtuoso Masayuki Takayanagi, and was the only one of Takayanagi's private students to ever graduate. Imai played for several months with Takayanagi's New Directions group in 1976.

Imai withdrew from live performance completely between 1985 and 1991. When he returned it was primarily as a solo performer, at a still ongoing series of self-promoted concerts entitled "Solo Works". From this time he began releasing solo and duo records, and performing with Western musicians who visited Japan, including Lee Konitz, Barre Phillips and Arthur Doyle.

In 1997, Imai was instrumental in reforming East Bionic Symphonia, under the new name of Marginal Consort. The group continue to play one concert each year."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazuo_Imai)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



CD1



1. First Set 32:09

CD2



1. Second Set 36:15

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
Asian Improvisation & Jazz
London & UK Improv & Related Scenes
Duo Recordings
Guitarists, &c.
Percussion & Drums

Search for other titles on the label:
Ftarri.


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