I hope people are doing as well as possible considering the situation across the globe.
I checked in on my website for the first time in a long while and saw that the last time I updated was in mid-January. Even at my best, I'm not very good about keeping up with my website and mailing lists but apparently, this pandemic and everything else that's been going on has REALLY set me back. Usually, these updates are to make announcements for upcoming performances, recordings and other projects but since nearly everything is on hold or canceled, there hasn't been much to update on that end. If anything, writing these is a way for me to process how events of the world have been affecting me as an artist, the music and entertainment industry, and the various communities and institutions I'm a part of.
Where to begin?
QUARANTINE AND COVID
About two weeks into quarantine I got very sick- fever, headache, cough, extreme exhaustion, completely lost my sense of smell- most likely COVID, especially considering that tests taken months later show I have antibodies. My partner Yurie nursed me back to health, cooking, and cleaning and doing multiple loads of laundry a day as I sweated profusely through clothes and bedding. Every morning, day in and day out, I would wake up in a fog, lumber into the kitchen, eat with my eyes half-open, use the restroom, then go back to sleep for another few hours. The fever finally broke the morning of day six, but then returned by the afternoon. After about ten days, the fever did finally break for good and over the next ten days, I slowly started building my strength back up, taking incrementally longer walks around the neighborhood.
Regarding the cough, it wasn't so much that I was coughing but that I felt my body wanting to cough but I suppressed that desire using the breath control that I'd been working on professionally for the last few decades. I had heard so many stories about how COVID attacks the lungs and how so many people suffer horrendously and are not able to breathe. I noticed early on how drained I felt after each bout of coughing and I didn't want my body consumed by it. I also could feel that the more I coughed, the more I wanted to keep coughing and that I was weaker to stop it... I feel that my experience strengthening and consciously controlling my breathing literally saved my life.
Before, during and after my bout with COVID, being in my apartment in Manhattan, I remember so clearly the endless wailing of ambulance sirens. I also remember how at 7 pm every night, New Yorkers all over the city would open their windows and cheer the first responders with applause, shouts, hitting pots and pans, and ringing bells. Thinking back to that time just a few months ago feels like a lifetime ago. The endless performing and traveling that had been my life for the last couple of decades feel like two lifetimes ago. I occasionally wondered when the seven pm ritual would end. When the official quarantine was lifted? Or the vaccine or cure discovered? The answer turned out to be the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that rocked the city. With so many people on the street marching and chanting, basically, there was nobody left to make noise for the first responders. Instead of a 7 pm beautiful cacophony marking the end of the typical workday, we now had the beautiful cacophony of chanting, drumming starting up and stopping and starting up again throughout the day.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Finally, it's starting to feel that people are being held accountable for how their actions strengthened the systemic racism that permeates American society, thanks to the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. While something as innocent as Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem (which was written by a slave-owning anti-abolitionist) was considered controversial just a couple of short years ago, now it's *almost* normal for athletes to openly show forms of protest. Speaking as an artist, I see the many arts organizations and institutions around me are undergoing long-overdue changes within their power structures and I see white musicians aggressively questioning their own peers about hiring and programming practices with an intensity that I hadn't really seen before.
Thinking back to my own life as a civil rights and environmental activist, I see that my endeavors have been meager. Yes, I have composed pieces in homage to black lives slain by the police (for example, Iki on my Néo album was written as a requiem for Eric Garner whose final words "I can't breathe" became a mantra-like prayer) and yes, I have always hired, by a vast majority, people of color and women to be in my ensembles. Yes, I often turn down and speak out against projects that reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes. One example of this is I had lengthy conversations with Wes Anderson about cultural appropriation and whitewashing while creating the soundtrack for Isle of Dogs, even considering at one point quitting the project. Perhaps most importantly, yes, I try to teach my seven-year-old daughter about the evils of racism, about the importance of knowing the history and background of how our society came to be and to fight for equal rights for everyone. (How does one teach a child the concept of one person buying, owning, and selling others?)
But what does all of that really add up to? What can I do differently? Much more aggressively call politicians, fundraise more for causes I believe in, mentor more the next generation, and the next generation after that to understand the roots of music and how to be aware and reverential of the past while evolving the music and the practice forward, engage more in conversation with people of conflicting views, speak truth to power. I need to develop a more robust vocabulary and a deeper understanding of society, power dynamics, oppression, politics. I think back in shame of the many instances of looking the other way when something racist or sexist was said and not saying anything to not create conflict or an awkward moment, especially when they involve someone in a similar sphere.
Society must do better.
I must do better.
SILKROAD COMMISSION: FRAGMENTS
So... what else? I was commissioned to write a piece for Silkroad, the ensemble I've been doing a lot of work with over the last ten years or so. The commission was for a two-person team and I had the wonderful Edward Perez as my partner. Edward is a first-rate jazz bass player, an expert in Latin jazz and Latin rhythms, who has written for the New York Philharmonic and others. On top of that, we were from the same circle of friends in high school although we missed going to school together by a year. It was both of our first times co-writing a piece and we had the pandemic-induced quarantine to deal with on top of that. The piece we wrote, called Fragments, was a reflection of the feeling of fragmentation in our world in terms of race, politics, and the pandemic. On top of the commission to write the piece, our duo was selected to debut the performance during the online Tanglewood Music Festival as part of the Silkroad 20th-anniversary concert. For the filming, Edward and I drove up (separately) to Tanglewood and, following their strict social distancing protocols performed for five remote-controlled cameras. For the last 25-30 years, I've been playing music with people on a near-constant basis so I felt the rush of endorphins as my brain tried to reconnect all those synapses- listening, reacting, breathing- the music was new and was actually too difficult for me to play... so there were quite a few flubbed moments EVEN after a few takes, overdubs and edits. I practiced so much but wasn't able to execute as I would've liked so I'm a little disappointed in my playing in the end.
KIBO NO HIKARI
Here is a performance I did as part of Music for Beirut, an online fundraiser to support the Children's Cancer Center Lebanon, which was damaged by the explosion that occurred August 4, 2020. The music features a recording of a man named Rami Taoukmani who makes music out of a traditional coffee grinder - basically a wooden bowl and long pole. I made this recording when I visited Beirut in 2018. I visited again in 2019 and both visits left such a wonderful impression of the people of Beirut. I fondly remember walking around the fun Hamra district, which was devastated by the explosion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO_NfqAoJBs&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=KaoruWatanabe
Please donate here: https://cccl.org.lb/Donate/44/CCCLs-Rescue-Fund
Past Online Concert:
杳と暁 HARUKA AND AKIRA
October 10, 17
This two-part concert series is for me an opportunity to connect to an audience, to mourn the loss of loved ones and to a way of life, and a way to celebrate the way forward as we pull together to face the new world we now inhabit. All the music that will be presented will be compositions created in 2020, most of it after the quarantine began. The title of the series, HARUKA TO AKIRA comes from the name of my father and uncle who were named by my grandfather, who happened to pass away in May 2020 at the age of 106, a product of a forgotten age. My father Haruka’s name (杳), which can be interpreted as “deep” or “distant hope” is a reflection of one of the darkest times of modern history, World War II, while his younger brother, whose name AKIRA (暁), “the light of dawn” or “enlightened”, was born after the end of the war.
I will be posting video from this concert eventually on the media page of this website.
