Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction for the Art – Complete “La Grima” LP

Description

Famed free jazz concert registration of an earlyNew Direction for the Artperformance. Recorded in 1971. The performance byTakayanagi Masayuki New Directionfor the Art at the Gen’yasai festival on August 14, 1971 was an intense, bruising collision between the radical, anti-establishment politics of the period in Japan and the febrile avant-garde music that had begun to emerge a few years before. 1962, Takayanagi, bassistKanai Hidetoand painterKageyama Isamuwent on to form anAACM-style musicians’ collective called theNew Century Music Research Institute. Every Friday, members gathered at Gin-Paris, a chanson bar in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo, to push the outer limits of jazz creativity. But the pivotal moment for his music was the creation a new trio version of his New Directions group in August 1969, with the free bassistYoshizawa Motoharuand a young drummerToyozumi (Sabu) Yoshisabur. Experiments eventually led to the creation of two basic frameworks for improvisation that Takayanagi referred to as “Mass Projection” and “Gradually Projection”.La Grima(tears), the piece that was played at the Gen’yasai festival, is a mass projection and listening to it, you can get a clear sense of what Takayanagi was aiming at. Mass projection involves a dense, speedy and chaotic coloring in of space that destroys the listener’s perception of time, and thus of musical development. The ferocity of the performance ofLa Grimaat the Gen’yasai Festival in Sanrizuka on August 14, 1971 was consciously grounded by Takayanagi in a particular historical moment, ripe with conflict and violence. A month after the festival, on September 16, three policemen would die during struggles at the site. This was the context that the three-day Gen’yasai Festival existed within. The line-up reflected the radical politics of the movement, with leading free jazz musicians like Takayanagi,Abe Kaoru, andTakagi Mototeruappearing alongside radical ur-punkersZuno Keisatsu, heavy electric blues bands likeBlues Creation, andHaino Keiji‘s scream-jazz unitLost Aaraaff. New Direction for the Arts trio topped the bill on the opening day, playing an aggressive, uncompromising “mass projection” set of polyphonic improvisation. Alongside drummerHiroshi Yamazakiand saxophonistKenji Mori, Takayanagi soloed hard and continuously for forty minutes. This was performance as precisely calibrated metaphor: three musicians responding to the demands of the moment with instinctive force and fury, untethered by rules, leaderless yet not rudderless (the direction part of the group’s name was no accident). The piece was entitledLa Grimaand the fusion between the palpable anger of the performance and hopeless sadness of its title were also perfectly apt for the situation. This was a fight that the state was always going to win. A union of anger, sorrow and malevolence that can be placed nowhere effective, all it can do is find expression and channeling. Old-style gatefold with rare photographs and extensive liner notes byAlan Cummings.