Naruyoshi Kikuchi Dub Sextet - "The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized" (ewe records 2007)
Naruyoshi Kikuchi – Tenor sax
Pardon Kimura – Dub Engineer
Tamaya Honda – Drums
Masato Suzuki – Bass
Shinpei Ruike – Trumpet
Masayasu Tzboguchi – Piano
Most eclectic takes on jazz are interesting, but not quite satisfying. Naruyoshi Kikuchi's Dub Sextet is the exception that proves the rule. Tweaking expectations and disrupting conventions rarely sounds so emotionally engaging as here. These six guys make exciting, intense music that scrambles adjectives and defies categories with humanness and humor. It's great music, adequately labeled or not.
"Dub Liz" opens the CD with a Miles-ish musing assertiveness. The trumpet and sax take some almost-tandem lines, then back off to search for other directions, or maybe indirections. The piano and bass create large open spaces under the horns, while Honda's drums comment on time rather than try to keep it steady. The result is lovely, open, weird and ready for when the dub engineer's effects come in towards the end, as if what the tune needed all along was more strangeness, not less.
There's more Ornette than Miles in "Dub Sorcerer" but Kikuchi knows how to draw on without deriving from. It's a great, wide-open tune that throbs with drum and bass energy as the trumpet and sax again take off for parts unknown. The dub noise comes screaming in towards the end, disrupting everything in what might be called a takedown rather than take-out.
"AAAL" circles around with a sense of adventure, like an unplanned walk in the city. The sextet seems to see the sounds of the song as if for the first time, that is, freshly and impressively. "Invocation" is perhaps the prettiest tune on the disc, though, pretty is not really in the aesthetic vocabulary of this group. This ballad-like song has a west coast cool sound, though again, more of the flavoring of west coast cool; the real taste comes from Kikuchi and the band's quirky hip attitudes.
"Caroline Champetier," a tribute, assumedly, to the French cinematographer and actress is slow, calm, and lightly stated. The arrangement is more suggestive than sharply outlined, as if recorded with the aural equivalent of soft focus. The other song dedicated to artistic women is titled "Susan Sontag," the writer, critic and intellectual who passed away in 2004. The song captures her moods and styles, and is an intense, aggressive tribute to one of America's best writers.
The eight songs are all originals mainly by Kikuchi, but each one clearly evolved as a group effort, with everyone given great freedom to express their own individual voice. The dub touches work well to enhance, rather than distract, from the others. The electric computerized feeling of those sounds always gets swept away in the forward flow of the other musicians anyway. These guys are intelligent, intense and focused and this sextet will hopefully follow this release up with more brash, fresh music unity-in-diversity from the same rich vein.