Featuring: Derek Bailey
Derek Bailey - guitar
Sabu Toyozumi - drums
| 1. My Jimny | 25:22 |
| 2. Diaphragm (guitar solo) | 13:19 |
| 3. Relux or Not Talking | 4:15 |
| 4. Fukuoka IMAI-House | 27:26 |
Michael Rosenstein - Point Of Departure
Japanese percussionist Yoshisaburo "Sabu" Toyozumi was an integral part of the first generation of free improvisers in Japan in the late 1960s along with Masayuki JoJo Takayanagi and Karou Abe, expanding his musical circle by travels to Chicago and Europe in the early 1970s as the only non-American member of the AACM. The musical bonds he formed helped him continue to foster a fertile scene in Japan including increasingly frequent visits by international musicians. Toyozumi has been particularly well served by the Lithuanian label NoBusiness records and their Chap Chap Series imprint. Over the course of the last decade, they’ve released a string of duos with musicians like Paul Rutherford, Abe, Wadada Leo Smith, Masahiko Satoh, Mats Gustafsson, and Peter Brötzmann along with an exhilarating trio with Takayanagi and Nobuyoshi Ino. Their recent batch of releases adds to that catalog with a trio by Brötzmann and Toshinori Kondo from 2016 along with a duo with Derek Bailey from 1987, in both cases bringing noteworthy live sessions from the vaults to light.
Breath Awareness documents a duo by Bailey and Toyozumi at IMAI-Tei, Fukuoka City, Japan from November 1987. Bailey had visited and played in Japan in 1978 though any encounters with Toyozumi on that trip remain unreleased. Returning in 1987, he toured the country performing with collaborators including reed player Mototeru Takagi (documented on the NoBusiness release Live At FarOut, Atsugi 1987), dancer Min Tanaka, a few duos with Toyozumi as well as a trio date with Toyozumi and Peter Brötzmann (released as a limited-edition CD on the Improvised Company label.) Bailey’s duo collaborations with percussionists were particularly effective over the course of his career, whether with regular partners Han Bennink and Tony Oxley or with less frequent partners like Cyro Baptista, Andrea Centazzo, Steve Noble, and Susie Ibarra. From the first moments of this recording, his duo with Toyozumi clicks.
The guitarist’s brittle shards meld with the drummer’s lithe, open attack. The two quickly foster a mode of parallel interaction, Bailey methodically hammering out a repeated skewed chord while Toyozumi tosses off spattered tom patterns and cymbal splashes. Over the course of the first 25-minute improvisation, the two parry and weave their way along simultaneous circuitous trajectories. The drummer favors clattering phrasing that charges along, ebbing into areas of uncluttered activity, then veers off into oblique densities. Bailey is at top form, parsing out ringing chords and scrabbled runs, shrewdly probing and prodding his partner. Bailey follows with a 13-minute guitar solo which is a study in flinty elegance and considered brilliance. The guitarist proceeds with resolute deliberation, letting overtones ring against each other countered by assiduously-phrased, sharply articulated mid-register motifs. Bailey was a master at spontaneously structured improvisation and this solo is a dazzling example of the guitarist at top form.
The solo is followed by a compact, musing 4-minute duo improvisation which leads into a 27-minute finale. Here, the playing is spikier and there is a more dynamic sense of interchange between the two. Toyozumi’s playing is more jazz-inflected, injecting a free momentum which Bailey responds to with razor-sharp, whorled torrents. The improvisation moves back and forth between sections of boisterous density and velocity, circumspect volleys, and fiery give-and-take. This is an invaluable discovery and a laudable addition to both Bailey and Toyozumi’s catalog.
Kurt Gottschalk - New York City Jazz Record
Guitarist Derek Bailey (who was born 95 years ago this month) certainly did as much as anyone to advance group improvisation as a form of discourse beyond the free jazz syntax. He’s been gone for 19 years as of last month, but new recordings continue to emerge and, for those open to high levels of spikey abstraction, engage. Bailey’s deeply thoughtful, extemporaneous solos could warm a weird heart, but it’s in duo where he excelled. Breath Awareness is a 1987 concert by Bailey and Japanese free jazz drummer Sabu Toyozumi, 13 years Bailey’s junior. If it isn’t one of the most acoustically pristine albums on which Bailey appears, it is among the more viscerally exciting. Despite the yogic title, it’s an energetic and cantankerous session. The guitarist hammers at the strings at times, in fast, full strums, working the volume pedal to articulate within thick blocks. He recedes in fast declines into false harmonic melodies or (relatively) jazzier progressions and Toyozumi is with him every step of the way. It’s a fascinating dynamic. The drummer is aware of his partner’s penchant for playing against, not with, and meets him on those terms. But it’s Bailey who charts the course. Toyozumi runs interference as if to say, ‘OK, I’ll counter you this way now.’ dding to the discord is the sound quality itself. There’s some unspoken alchemy between amplifier and recorder going on, and certainly between player and amplifier as well, making Breath Awareness a brilliant but brittle album. The drums are a bit off-mic, the guitar sounds as if it’s coming through an M transistor radio, and the combination is perfect. It’s not muddy or muted, just wonderfully harsh. Toyozumi’s playing might be more familiar than his name to Western listeners. In the same month as this concert (ovember 1987), Bailey and Toyozumi played in a trio with Peter Brötzmann (released in 2000 as Live in Okayama 1987). He’s heard on record in duos with Kaoru be, Paul utherford and Wadada Leo Smith, and in groups with Tristan Honsinger, Toshinori Kondo and Peter Kowald as well as with Barre Phillips and Keiji Haino. Perhaps most notably, the drummer became the first non-merican member of the ssociation for the dvancement of Creative Musicians in 1971 and made an album, Sabu– Message to Chicago, dedicated to CM musicians. This 70-minute meeting (available as CD or download) includes a 13-minute solo piece by Bailey, but it’s the full throttle duo that makes the album matter.
