#tatsu aoki

[musicmakesyousmart]

Mako Sica with Hamid Drake, Thymme Jones, Tatsu Aoki - Formless

Feeding Tube Records

2022

[asianamsmakingmusic]

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[dustedmagazine]

The Miyumi Project – And Then They Came For Us/Un-American (Asian Improv)

An American form of historical and cultural amnesia is neither novel nor nascent. It has direct corollaries in man’s inhumanity to man, which is as old as our species itself and a constant pattern of behavior past, present and presumably future. The Miyumi Project, an ensemble of Asian improvisers, turns its attention a specific and egregious example of that inhumanity on American shores and the amnesia that followed in its indefensible wake. And Then They Came for Us/Un-American is inspired by two titular works, the first a documentary film and the second a non-fiction book. Both explore the experiences of Japanese Americans during and after the internment policies enacted and enforced by the U.S. Government in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

A colorful cadre of guests join the core Project members bassist Tatsu Aoki, woodwinds player Edward Wilkerson, cellist Jamie Kempkers, guitarist Rami Atassi, percussionist Kioto Aoki, bamboo flautist Miyumi Aoki, and drummer Jun Takanarita on several pieces including drummers Chad Taylor and Avreeayl Ra, reedists Mwata Bowden and Francis Wong, the latter of whom also serves as producer. The music is sequenced as an episodic soundtrack and sourced in part from Aoki’s interviews with numerous survivors of the camps. The album’s packaging contains a handful of period photos depicting those American citizens who were forced to relocate and abandon their earlier lives purely on the basis of their ethnicity and the presumed threat national security that entailed.

An obvious and immediate emotion undergirding the music is anger. Aoki and Kempker’s set up a somber field of sound on the opening title piece to create an ambling dirge in concert with Wilkerson’s emotive clarinet and Attasi’s edgy guitar. Aoki doubles on shamisen and taiko elsewhere in the program and a four-piece Japanese drum choir joins the group as well to broaden the percussive base and bring added rhythmic resonance. “Madness” is a germane single word signifier of the situation recounted in sound as Wilkerson’s tenor threads through a spare terrain of taiko, bells and distantly droning bass.  Feelings of sadness and portent pervade, but neither is unearned or overdone as the music often adopts a dark chamber-like beauty that is harrowing and transfixing in the clarity of its constituents.

At once a cautionary narrative of a past jingoistic breach and an overt indictment of the strains of xenophobia currently being fomented and fortified by the highest echelons of the United States political power structure this set is both timely and justifiably trenchant. The shameful stain on this nation’s history is indelible and immense, but even so the real possibility of repeat performance into nativist hysteria, this time aimed at another increasingly marginalized minority, feels entirely plausible if not probable. Pastor Martin Niemöller’s anecdotal alarm elucidating the self-defeating perils of unchecked populism rings as true today as it always did and The Miyumi Project’s music frames that aphorism in bold and bracing aural relief.

Derek Taylor

[musicmakesyousmart]

Mako Sica / Hamid Drake with Tatsu Aoki & Thymme Jones - OURANIA

Feeding Tube Records

2021

[dustedmagazine]

Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Tatsu Aoki— Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Tatsu Aoki Vol 1 (Asian Improv)

People come at improvised music from diverse angles. Some are committed to an idiom, such as jazz or Indian classical music. Others are determinedly non-idiomatic. And then there are folks who value the experiences and opportunities yielded by spontaneous music making so much that they decline to recuse themselves from an available aesthetic approach. Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Tatsu Aoki are two such musicians.

Aoki is a bassist, shamisen player and filmmaker who has lived in Chicago since the late 1970s. Originally drawn to the city by the opportunity to study experimental film, he soon fell in with musicians associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. His current projects include the Miyumi Ensemble, which combines jazz with Taiko drumming; the more tradition-conscious Tsukasa Taiko Ensemble; and a steady stream of occasional associations with Francis Wong, Jeff Chan, Drazek Fuscaldo and others. Hunsinger is a multi-instrumentalist who earns her crust as a professional oboist, but who also played single and double reeds and stringed instruments in theatrical, experimental, country and rock settings. Around a quarter of a century ago, she and Aoki worked together in the original line-up of Miyumi Ensemble, a duo that went unrecorded at the time, and a trio with Art Ensemble of Chicago veteran Joseph Jarman. Hunsinger gravitated to work in southern states and vanished from the Chicago experimental scene until the 2020s.

Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Tatsu Aoki Vol 1 picks up a long-dormant thread, but it does not sound like the work of two strangers. Recorded in one day at the AIRMW Cultural Hub, a performance and rehearsal space that Aoki founded for Asian Improv Records, it feels more like a patient working through of possibilities. For Hunsinger, that means moving from instrument to instrument. On oboe, she draws out non-repeating melodic lines which periodically pull into dense knots, and then unwind with ease. When she switches to saxophones, tin whistle and double reeds, the progress slows and the line doesn’t break; color and vibe predominate. And when she picks up the violin, a raw, folky texture smudges the precision she favors on winds. In free settings, Aoki toggles easily between conventional and extended techniques. He tends to advocate for pulse, but he obtains it in a variety of ways, from plucking a springy groove to beating intricate figures on the strings. He also matches Hunsinger scrape for bowed scrape. Some improvisers battle it out; Hunsinger and Aoki are more respectfully collaborative. The result is music that moves freely between formal methods, but gravitates to form.

Bill Meyer

[dialoogid]

Wu Man & Tatsu Aoki - Posture of Reality (2003)

[burlveneer-music]

Best of the MIYUMI Project - Chicago-based bassist Tatsu Aoki’s Afro-Asian jazz collaboration (FPE Records)

Creative music has historically provided a platform for uniting its participants, not only relying on but encouraging individuals with unique backgrounds and disparate traditions. It is a universal language that allows for constructive discourse with everyone on equal footing. Witnessing the dialogue between musicians spontaneously creating on the spot is quite literally the democratic process in action. So, with the turmoil of the U.S. political environment and democracy at stake, where better to turn than to someone who sets by example, with inclusiveness and a democratic approach and concept for creativity being priorities. Enter bassist Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project, one of the first Asian American / African American collaborative music projects in Chicago, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. Since the release of the eponymously titled The MIYUMI Project, the group has forged a special Afro-Asian musical hybrid in the intervening two decades, successfully fusing the Japanese taiko drumming tradition with first class improvisers (many from Chicago, where Aoki has been based since the late ‘70s). And to celebrate and commemorate this trailblazing, still active band, we now have this outstanding release with cherry-picked selections from MIYUMI's vast discography including a previously unreleased live bonus track. During the ‘70s Aoki was an underground Tokyo experimental artist interested in the American avant garde and influenced by a fascinating cross-section of bassists - from Charles Mingus and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Malachi Favors, to rock ‘n rollers such as Kenny Gradney (Little Feat), John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) and Dee Murray (Elton John). Moving to the U.S. from his native Japan in 1977, eventually to Chicago in 1979, he would work extensively with Windy City tenor saxophone legend Fred Anderson. In 1997 Aoki’s collaboration in the Power Trio (At Unity Temple, Asian Improv) with two members of the lauded AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) – woodwind specialist Mwata Bowden (one of Aoki’s longest musical associations) and drummer/percussionist Afifi Phillard (Sun Ra alumnus and Aoki mentor) - marked the unofficial inception of his MIYUMI concept. The MIYUMI Project was named after the bassist’s third child. “Every time my kid was born, I made an album for each of them,” said Aoki, “but when Miyumi was born, instead of producing an album for her, I named the whole band after her because you know how immigrant families come to America and you sort of have this identity debate about who you are: the longer you stay you become an American, and eventually – in my case - you become Asian-American. By the time she was born I realized my family was now post-war immigrant Japanese American / Asian American. So to commemorate that awakening and awareness I named the whole band with this concept.” From the group’s first album the taiko drumming influence was an undeniable element, Aoki infusing Japanese-influenced aesthetics of accompaniment within the rhythm section, carrying his concept of time into, through and underneath the music as an essential and, as importantly, natural thread. An integral part of his rhythm section, Aoki as bassist has shown empathy towards the drum traditions of Japanese taiko and jazz, and his music and approach incorporates the drummer languages of each. From the group’s first album he plays bass and taiko drum on “Early Dance”, sharing an otherworldly ethnic influence with Bowden playing didgeridoo, double-reed specialist Robbie Hunsinger on the Chinese shenai, Hide Yoshihashi on taiko drum and Paul Kim on Korean buk drum. (Elsewhere on the group’s debut recording the taiko influence is further intensified by Patti Adachi on taiko and Yoshihashi on shime, a high-pitched, small Japanese drum). -Laurence Donohue-Greene (Managing Editor, The New York City Jazz Record) 

[bjorkempire]

Tatsu Aoki - Puzzle III (2003)