Interview with Otomo Yoshihide, The Mastery of Guitar & Turntable Achieved in His Mid-60s Part.1 (2/4)
2024-02-28
author:Narushi Hosoda
On the solo album Guitar Soloreleased in 2005
–One of your most significant milestones as a guitarist must have been your solo album Guitar Solo released in 2005. It was also the first release for a label doubtmusic. What motivated you to make that album featuring guitar sounds?
Otomo: One of the motivations was to present a sound source to my old friend Jun Numata to congratulate him on founding his own label after retiring from the record store Disk Union. I couldn’t spend too much money on it, so I recorded it live at Shinjuku Pit Inn instead of in a studio (The sound was recorded on October 12, 2004). Since it was meant to be a gift, I thought other musicians’ participation would complicate things, so I decided to make it a solo project. I had started doing solo shows just a while before that and playing guitar for film scores – in fact, I played guitar a little bit for film music in the 90s as well – so I decided it was time to make a solo guitar album. But I didn’t have the skills that other guitarists would typically have, so that album was a challenge of playing solo guitar to the extent that I could.
–In 2002, Derek Bailey released a solo album called Ballads on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. The content is totally different, but I see an overlap between that and Otomo’s Guitar Solo. In other words, both albums are not entirely improvisational but feature composed pieces that are played in a different way than they were originally meant to be. Both of them are peculiar in that they were created as a result of performances of composed pieces by musicians who have always worked on improvisation and noise music.
Otomo：It is true that when Ballads came out, I was stunned by it and thought, “Oh, this way of playing music is possible?” I remember that I listened to it so many times. Of course, Derek Bailey had always been my favorite since I decided to do music, but the fact that Bailey released Ballads may have been significant for me. For example, “Ballads” opens with a song called “Laura.” And if you follow the standard theory of jazz, you keep the chord progression and bars of “Laura” as the song develops. But if you listen to Derek Bailey’s music, it’s not like that. The song starts with the theme, but then it develops freely and comes back to the theme again. But that works totally fine. I thought that was very free and nice.
However, I had already tried that approach with the New Jazz Quintet. I had a theme at the beginning of the piece but would develop an improvisation utterly different from the theme, or the piece would take an unexpected direction and then return to the theme at the end. I had been experimenting with approaches that did not fit into the traditional jazz format, and I think “Ballad” made me realize that it was okay to do that with solo guitar. Of course, I can’t play like Derek Bailey, so I tried to do it my own way.
–Did you also consider making a solo guitar album completely based on noise/improvisation, rather than composed pieces?
Otomo: It was not an option at that time. I even thought that recording only with noise and improvisation was something I didn’t need to do anymore. I did it a lot at shows, though. But actually, I had released a guitar improvisation piece on CD-R called Guitar Solo Live 1 (1999). But I didn’t find it very interesting, and I thought improvisation should disappear right after it’s done. If I was going to release it as an album, I wanted to keep the composed music in some form. It seemed more fresh at the time.
Actually, solo improvisation is complex, and it’s not really improvisation in the true sense of the word. In terms of duos and trios, players tend to think about what to play during the performance, but with solos, that’s not really the case. The performances are strongly tied to my previous experiences, and it is very hard to break out of them. And there had been many great solo improvisation albums like the one by Derek Bailey before mine. I was not the type of person who had pioneered improvisation in that way. So at that point, I didn’t feel like making a solo guitar album only consisting improvisation and noise.
“Lonely Woman” is “homework” left by Masayuki Takayanagi
–If we were to place improvisation and composed pieces at the two ends of the spectrum, I feel that “Lonely Woman” is positioned in the middle of them in the case of Otomo’s guitar performance. Ornette Coleman originally wrote it, but when you perform improvisation completely live, melodies of “Lonely Woman” sometimes pop up naturally, doesn’t it?
Otomo: Yeah, sometimes. Well, when I worked on improvisations on the guitar, it was not like I didn’t have any references. But among all, Mr. Takayanagi’s solo guitar album Lonely Woman (1982) was the most influential. I tried not to listen to it when I picked up the guitar again because I would be influenced too much by it. I tried to store it in a distant part of my memory, but I couldn’t help thinking about it. It was in the 2000s that I decided that it would be okay to play “Lonely Woman” every time. I didn’t care how I played it. It could come out of nowhere in an improvised performance, or I could play “Lonely Woman” from the beginning and break it up to create a rhythm or whatever. That means Takayanagi-san, rather than Ornette Coleman, was the most influential figure for me when playing the guitar.
Of course, Ornette Coleman was influential as well. In my opinion, “Lonely Woman” was his first harmolodics-oriented piece. It may also mean that I somehow want to be connected to the history of jazz. However, I haven’t played almost any of Ornette’s songs except for “Lonely Woman,” so I’m aware that I still see the history of jazz through the lens of Mr. Takayanagi.
–Did the song “Lonely Woman” mean a lot to Mr. Takayanagi as well?
Otomo: That is a mystery. As far as I know, Mr. Takayanagi only performed “Lonely Woman” in his solo performance. I saw almost all of his live performances, but he never played “Lonely Woman” in a group like Angry Waves. Moreover, at that time, Mr. Takayanagi didn’t say anything about Ornette Coleman in particular, and I always heard him talking about Albert Ayler. So I honestly don’t know why it was “Lonely Woman.”
However, the last time Mr. Takayanagi played “Lonely Woman” was probably in 1984. He toured Hokkaido with Teruto Soejima and played “Lonely Woman” at the first concert, and everything else was noise. After that, he didn’t play “Lonely Woman” anymore, even after returning to Tokyo. He shifted to “Action Direct,” which was about generating a lot of noise. As I watched, I kept thinking, “It would be good to play ‘Lonely Woman’ in Action Direct,” and I told Mr. Takayanagi about it, but every time I told him, he would say, “Otomo, you don’t understand that. They are different things.”
That convinced me, but I was also driven by the desire to play them together. That is why I have been playing “Lonely Woman” as something that suddenly appears out of the noise or starts with that theme but develops into something completely different. For me, “Lonely Woman” is like an “assignment” left behind by Mr. Takayanagi. Takayanagi himself had moved on to the next phase, like action direct, and just left me with the song.
