JAPAN, MA, and JAZZ

There is a gone-ness here, all around us, weaved between licks and stabs of frequent sound, of John Cage and Bill Evans reclaimed and born eastward, the space between and in all things.

There is little doubt that the lack of sound itself constitutes a sonic feeling, yes-yes, “silence speaks louder than words”, and, yes-yes, the attitude laden single note solos of McNealy run as straight as an arrow (his red face comes to mind), but whether or not the tint of silence paints the canvas or is the canvas itself comes to question. This “invisible” canvas I speak of is a sound philosophy that I cannot help but attribute to japanese visual arts and japanese jazz.

We look eastward, to Japan post-war, in nippon laden baseball bats and Christmas KFC meals for the source of the ever cryptic invisible canvas. While Jazz and improvisation had to come to Japan in the 1910’s, It had a resurgence in the absence of WW2’s anti-American ideals and the American takeover. As America came flooding in through every orifice, in population and culture, Japan assimilated. In response to this overload of america, there was a general consensus among the older japanese generations as to re-integrate more traditional japanese culture to balance it out, finding a space in music especially (think of the “dreamy” nature of Joe Higashi’s soundtracks, which utilized classical japanese scales to achieve it’s sound, or Akiyoshi's use of the tsuzumi in her big band album Kogun), not excluding jazz.

There are still heads, solos, and walking basslines in an album such as Hiromi Suzuki’s Cat, but it’s as if it imbues the feeling of cool jazz with the intent of it’s hot counterpart. It’s so locked in at times, but it breaks away so cleanly into moments of Suzuki’s occasional thoughts. I may not know where this thought takes me, but I am confident in it. Let it’s implications hang. Let’s explore, not a sentence but a statement, a statement that lingers and, at its most and least poignant, existing. How about the water drop buzz of Ryo Fukui’s piano, his fingers tapping slightly as the bassline comes in, each phrase connected to one another by a thread, the turn of the head to observe a nearby flower.

It’s a difficult thing to be precise about (no doubt because my perspective is rooted in America), but I will try to, using what I know. Much like beat is felt, so is ma. It is not so much the minute gaps of silence in between notes, not staccato, but the coat of quiet imbued in the sound itself. Not a sentence but a statement. It could very well be a difference in audio recording, but the music spans the 1960’s to now, and every recording i’ve heard is coated in it. Ma. The space between all things. A conversation made up of single sentences, a time spent reflecting on things said, the choice to photograph a trawling snail rather than the gold coins falling out of the sky. I’m beginning to believe that ma makes itself present in the fact that every lick and sound is not meant to be contemplated, to maybe be anti-contemplated. To just exist. To be without thinking at all, a concept deeply rooted in buddhism. There is, to my western eyes, a dissonance between these two. Does Ma come from the absence of thought, or the contemplation of thought? Haiku’s are meant to be contemplated, but buddhist meditation is meant to be emptiness. I don’t think I truly understand it just yet, but what I do know is this.

It does not seem to be an intentional action. “In conversation with American people, you need to keep talking, '' says Isao Tsujimoto, former director General of The Japan Foundation in New York, “(western) people have a kind of fear of having ma.”

“But, somehow Japanese people have a sense to enjoy that kind of blankness - a notion that reflects in every aspect of japanese culture.”

It’s not that there are different techniques being used, but that there are different ways of perceiving said techniques entirely.