Kei Akagi

his musical training between classical and jazz, his jazz playing between electric and acoustic, and his working life between teaching jazz at university and performing in jazz clubs at night. These continually bifurcating experiences have become focused into his vision of jazz as "omnivorous,""heterogeneous,"and "inherently unstable."

Jazz pianist Kei Akagi clearly relishes the dual nature of the human mind. This is no surprise coming from someone who has divided his home between the United States and Japan, his college studies between philosophy and music, his musical training between classical and jazz, his jazz playing between electric and acoustic, and his working life between teaching jazz at university and performing in jazz clubs at night. These continually bifurcating experiences have become focused into his vision of jazz as "omnivorous,""heterogeneous,"and "inherently unstable."

Akagi’s trajectory from church music in Cleveland, to touring with Airto Moreiro, Joe Farrell, Stanley Turrentine and Miles Davis, to setting up a program in jazz at the University of California at Irvine has been a fascinating one. His current trio, touring Japan this summer, reflects his experience with vigor, eloquence and a startlingly open approach. Their just-released CD, "A Hint of You,"thrives on the dynamics of Akagi’s brash, but buoyant piano, Tomokazu Sugimoto’s muscular yet lyrical bass, and Tamaya Honda’s lean, complex drumming ("Honda thinks like an orchestra,"Akagi noted). He took time two weeks ago before a mid-tour gig at Aoyama’s Body and Soul to talk about his new trio, jazz and life.

What are the roots of your interest in jazz?

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, the Hough area, the black section. We were the only non-black family for miles around, and we went to a black church, so I was surrounded by African-American music. I never consciously remember listening to it, but it was just there. I remember hearing as a kid all those organ trios, Jimmy Smith. So, that was my background and I was taking classical piano lessons at the same time. I started getting interested in 20th century music, and one of my high school teachers told me that to have an appreciation of 20th century music, you have to have an understanding of jazz. I'm forever indebted to that teacher. I went to the record store, closed my eyes, and pulled out a record from the bin. It was a Bud Powell piano trio.

A good pull.

A very good pull. When I heard that, my eyes got so big, and I thought, for the first time, here's the music I've been looking for. It had all the rhythmic roots I grew up with in Cleveland, all the blues mentality, and all of the sophistication of 20th century classical music. So, that's how I got hooked. I practiced on my own and put a jazz group together of high school students. That was 1969. And then I started playing with the local college jazz group. I was a high school kid, so that was totally illegal also. When I went to International Christian University here in Tokyo, I joined the jazz club. I never thought I'd become a professional musician. Then I went to the States in 1975 for graduate school in philosophy at U.C. Santa Barbara. A couple months after my getting there, I played with Blue Mitchell.

So, you were playing around town there all the time?

Not so much. It was just that people found out about me. All these famous musicians would come up from L.A. to play gigs, so they started calling me. After two years of trying to balance life as a graduate student in the philosophy department while playing in the jazz clubs at night, it just got to be too much. I finally decided to ask myself, what am I doing with my life? I decided, you only live once, so I really should do something that I really want to do. I was supposed to do a presentation in class that day. I called up my professor in the morning, and told him that I knew I was supposed to be giving a presentation that day, but I decided I was going to quit school and become a jazz musician. There was dead silence, and then this incredulous voice said, "You mean starting today?"I said, "Yes sir, starting today."He said, "Well, good luck."

Then you played around town there?

Within about two years, I got the gig with Airto Moreira. I was with him for seven years. That was incredible. The Brazilian aspect aside, what I really learned was what it means to be a musician, the responsibilities of being a musician and the values that musicians live by.

So, he was a real leader?

Well, actually, he has no technical knowledge of the music. But, he knows what it is. It forced me to think differently, because his leadership didn’t come to me as musical. It was more a question of the feeling and the integrity of the execution. In the course of trying to interpret his remarks, I had to dig deep inside myself and find out what was there. And lo and behold, what I found was that there was not a lot there.

What kind of comments would he make?

He wouldn’t say things like play this here in the intro or play this chord there. He’d say, play something more tasteful, or play something more graceful here, or play something ugly in this place. Things that really have to do with the emotional impact of what you’re doing. So, how to translate that into where the rubber meets the road, right? That really got me going. At that time, I didn’t have a whole lot of depth or breadth. I didn’t have much emotional feeling, I could only do what little I knew.

And then you got hookedup with Miles?

No, then I got together with Joe Farrell. It was with Joe that I got my real hardcore jazz education. Airto taught me what it is to think like a musician. Joe taught me what it is to think like a jazz musician. He was in the old New York school, a bebop musician in other words. He was always pulling me aside and telling me what to play, real clearly. He would say that chord does not work, or that line is no good. That was quite a group, that was myself, John Patitucci on bass and Tom Brookline, who came out of Chick Corea’s group. After that I went through a succession of electric jazz bands, Jean-Luc Ponty, Allan Holdsworth, and Al Dimeola.

So, what kind of experience was it playing with Miles?

The stuff I learned in Miles’ band I really couldn’t have learned anywhere else. There were so many different levels. The first thing of course was the musical level, why the music works in a certain way or does not work in a certain way. He really made you think of connections in very different ways, for example, the use of absolute dead silence, and how to integrate it. He emphasized that if your total number of ideas is 100 percent, then you should play 50 or 60 percent of that. The idea is that it’s always better to hint at an idea or a mood rather than to play it out fully. It’s musical insinuation rather than presentation. When Miles got the key to city of France, the mayor described him as the Picasso of jazz. It’s that kind of abstractionism. He plays some stuff that is so off the wall, but then you play it and it makes perfect sense. He’s latching onto something that no one else thought of.

It makes sense how someone can do that himself, but how do you get other people to do it?

That’s where Miles is a genius. I never met a leader like him. He never said a whole lot, he never told me a whole lot. But after a while you find yourself playing his music anyway. You find yourself reacting like he would. Dealing with Miles, I got a glimpse of what it means to be a leader, a real leader. Even though he could be hardnosed, he never treated sidemen like sidemen, but managed to get his musicians to be part of an organism, without them realizing it. With Miles I always knew exactly what to do. With the other musicians in the band, there were a lot of choices, of course, but really it was an issue of clarity, you just knew what to do.

Were you still playing acoustic then or only electric?

All the time I was playing electric, but I never stopped playing acoustic, as a piano trio. It’s just that those were not the gigs that were in the limelight that people would notice. I was always working on my acoustic piano trio at small clubs that no one ever came to. So, that was always parallel. My generation was like that. That was the difference between then and now. That generation of keyboardists was all jazz keyboardists first, and electronics became incorporated into their playing as an extension of that. It was not a binary choice. So, as keyboardists, we were expected to play bebop as well as the latest mini-Moog phrase. It’s only later that things became specialized.

Your latest CD, "A Hint of You,"really comes together.

This is the CD I’m most happy with. The reason for that is, looking back on it, it’s the most human. I wasn’t out to prove anything to myself anymore or to the listening public. This is just a very straightforward representation of who I am. I wasn’t afraid of myself, I wasn’t afraid of whatever reactions I’d come up with in the studio. It was going to be what it was going to be. I didn’t strive to set up any specific moods. Also, I had complete faith in my musicians [Tomokazu Sugimoto on bass and Tamaya Honda on drums]. I knew that whatever happened in the studio it would be good and it would be musical. I had faith in ourselves to be able to take an old standard like Benny Golson’s "Stablemates"or a pop tune like Misia’s "Everything"and make it our own. Even if it seems like a disparity of repertory, our performance would bring it all together. So, in that way, it’s a step away from a compositional emphasis, to a performance emphasis.

How do you work in the studio?

We just get together and play. I could not have performed these tunes with other people. Only these two cats. Sugimoto is a wonder and Honda thinks like an orchestra. We work things out. I brought a couple new tunes with me this tour and it’s taken four or five times to really understand what it is. A lot of times I don’t understand what I wrote, I don’t understand what mood it’s in or what the tune’s supposed to be about, so it takes a few times.

It grows organically?

It’s music that’s a group effort, a cooperative effort, that's the result of a consensus of a high sort, with no sense of compromise. The way we work together is everybody’s free to put in their own ideas and their own concepts at whatever moment. We all know that we can react to each other appropriately. The overall parameters are wider than any band I’ve ever had. Some musicians sound and play better when the parameters are narrower. That’s not a defect or anything, that’s just how they set things up to sound the best. But other players sound better when you give them the world.

How do you balance performing with teaching? What are you teaching?

I’m teaching jazz history, theory, composition and ensemble. We have a jazz major in the music program. Now you can get a bachelor’s in jazz performance, and a Master’s.

Obviously they had classical there before you. Is that an ongoing argument?

There is an unfortunate tradition of there not being such good blood between classical and jazz. But it’s also a generational thing. The younger classical musicians, teachers and composers are very respectful and many have come through jazz themselves. The older generation whose background is very European are the ones who have difficulty. However, the older generation who are also versed in American music are usually understanding and appreciative of jazz. That’s because you can’t speak of American composition in the 20th century without speaking of jazz. You can barely speak of late 19th century European composition without bringing in jazz. The argument is mainly with those classical teachers who think that all good music stopped with Debussy.

So, jazz can be taught, that is, the old idea of learning jazz by suffering and scraping by is just a romantic idea?

I think that’s just a romantic idea. There was never a time when musicians really liked that. I think musicians always aspired to better working conditions, more social respect, Carnegie Hall. I think there’s a certain tragic romanticism that’s been associated with jazz that’s been cultivated not by the musicians themselves, but by the media. The romantic bitter idealist that finally dies of a drug overdose, ignored by society, all alone, like Charlie Parker. That really has nothing to do with the aspirations of the musicians themselves. Nobody wants to be poor. Nobody wants to be ignored. Nobody wants to suffer. I think that the legitimization of jazz that has occurred in academic campuses in the past century is good if that leads to jazz as a really legitimate art form, and to wider acceptance of it. If it’s possible to give students a systematic exposure, so they can make the best use of their time and learn in four years what it would have taken them 15 years to learn otherwise, I think that’s a very good thing. It gives them a longer life to be creative.

Are there any dangers?

The danger is anytime you classicize an art, what you’re doing is setting up a canon. Then, you have a set repertoire, a set method, and a set system of values. That becomes the orthodoxy. The issue is whether the orthodoxy squelches creativity in ways that it need not have been squelched. The question about jazz is that traditionally, jazz has been a mixture of the classicism that you find in professionally trained musicianship, there’s no way to play jazz without training, but at the same time it also has strong roots in the ethnic musical values brought over from West Africa. That’s what African-Americanism is, that unique combination of a certain kind of western European emphasis on training and the African emphasis on the social functionality of music that does away with the distinction between composer and performer, and between musician and audience.

So, what happened to classical music might also happen to jazz?

Classical music became too self-referential, and that ultimately proved to be the death of classical music. The only way to keep jazz alive is to draw from outside. Jazz has always grown because it has brought things in from outside. My personal opinion is that jazz is inherently unstable. The very instability of jazz as an art form gives it its appeal, and at the same time makes it important. I don’t want jazz to lose that. Jazz is omnivorous.

(Shorter version appeared in The Japan Times August 2003. This version Jazznin 2004)

Interviews, UncategorizedDecember 10, 2008