Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabackin
Vintage Duo Concert
B Flat, Akasaka
April 29, 2016
Toshiko Akiyoshi —piano
Lew Tabackin—sax, flute
At this special concert celebrating 70 years in jazz and 60 years since she went to America for the first time, Toshiko Akiyoshi sounded fantastic. And that’s not just fantastic for an 86-year-old, it’s fantastic for a jazz pianist. To hear her together with Lew Tabackin in a duo at B Flat, especially with a packed-in, welcoming audience, is to hear history, but it’s also to hear great jazz.
Akiyoshi and Tabackin marvelously complement each other, and not just because they’ve played together for so many decades. Akiyoshi’s playing was bluesy and American, with a full-on left hand that kept plucking out juicy bass notes, while Tabackin’s flute was sharp, piercing then delicate. He plays as otherworldly and Japanese-flute-like as any jazz musician around. That’s a very good exchange on numerous levels, personal, improvisatory, sonic, textural. On each song the two played muscularly and melodically, with a fluidity and openness beyond what the absence of a bass and drums usually allows.
Akiyoshi was especially stirring on “I Loves You Porgy,” going into the song with equal measures of seriousness and curiosity. On “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” Tabackin took off with tremendous invention and solid blowing breath. The fast take on “Perdido” and joyous bounce of “Take the A Train” showed how fully Akiyoshi and Tabackin are steeped into jazz tradition, with energy and comfort balanced against each other to make those standards all the more interesting. It also shows how well their own compositions fit into that tradition, like Tabackin’s “A Bit Byas’d,” which found the two in a lively give and take.
Akiyoshi’s “Hope,” from her “Hiroshima” big band recording was the perfect ending to the show. Though, Akiyoshi did not stop to talk with her many fans in the audience, the song showed how well she understands music’s power to convey not just ideas, but an entire world of values. The standing-room-only audience knew just what she and Tabackin meant. They gave the duo a standing ovation as she walked back to the dressing room.
The show was a very special evening of jazz that brought in such a full range of songs, feelings, experience and energy. The two musicians connected deeply to Ellington and to the world, to their own big band work and their solo work, and to the audience, whose final applause lasted long, with all the extra thanks it’s possible to pack into two hands clapping.