My on-off love affair with jazz goes back a very long time and growing up, I too, embarrassingly flirted with 1970’s fusion jazz! At that time, most young Japanese musicians thought fusion was the ‘rightful development’ of jazz. Fortunately, some of the young musicians (like myself) also began to listen to jazz retrospectively. In turn, I developed a particular passion for 1950s ‘Hard bop’ jazz, enjoying the creative aural delights of pianists such as Wynton Kelly, Red Garland and Sonny Clark. For me they soon replaced their popular contemporaries as the future of jazz!
As an aspiring musician myself, then playing in a fusion band, I wanted to play like my jazz masters, but one day, in a rehearsal, one of the band members declared severely ‘your playing is not Jazz like, you play with obscure improvisation and even worse than that, you lack any consistent rhythm. He also told me ‘you should give up jazz and go to rock, so you don’t need to play with accuracy, or rhythm, or wit or hot ad-libs!’.
OUCH THAT HURT!
So off I went, leaving fusion to its final demise, choosing to pursue a career in rock music, beginning with Eight and a Half, then Halmens, before finally beginning Guernica project. But from that day I always carried a weighty personal trauma against my playing jazz! so I needed every ounce of courage when I decided to start KUT.
Maybe I choose Jazz because I would like to fulfil my lost dream?
