Akihiro Yoshimoto & Takashi Sugawa: Oxymoron
Oxymoron is a live recording from saxophone player Akihiro Yoshimoto and bassist Takashi Sugawa. The duo recorded a live performance in 2016 at the jazz club Apollo in Tokyo, Japan, and released that recording as this album in 2017.
Through the album’s eleven tracks and thirty-six minutes, Yoshimoto and Sugawa play free jazz and experimental music that pushes beyond the boundaries of standard jazz. The pair avoids the more easily identifiable trademarks of conventional music and songwriting to chase the free-flowing exchange of spontaneous ideas and sounds with few limits imposed.
The ingredients are Yoshimoto on soprano sax and clarinet, Sugawa on cello and contrabass, and beautiful inspiration. The result is filled with eccentric and atonal aspects: wild flights of notes punctuated with wavering drones, careful twining of improvised melodies, and knife-edge slices of notes forming and dissipating in unsettling conditions.
That said, it’s not an album full of noise or ambient effects (though the Bandcamp page for the album does include the tags ambient and dark ambient, along with jazz, contemporary jazz, and freejazz). Horn notes fly around in unpredictable paths, pouring phrases into the air while low notes percolate, bass notes pop and ring, and bowed strings expose eerie terrains.
To some, free jazz may sound like turbulent chaos, dissonant and abstract. Adventurous listeners (especially those searching for new sounds or a break from the ordinary) may appreciate these trips through unexplored territory. On Oxymoron, it is as if two pioneers are making discoveries through risky experiments that cause tuneful chirps, singing tones, and the evocative plucking, strumming, and bowing of bass string notes.
The songs played on Oxymoron seem to be sketched out with anything from simple outlines and thematic concepts to written-out intros and endings. Listening closely and wondering how much is pre-composed and how much is pure ad-libbing can be part of the experience.
The duo’s risk-taking and randomness increase the thrill of the musical search and the potential for invention1.
Many of the songs on Oxymoron are just a few minutes long in the two- to three-minute range. These are briefly visited ideas that the duo stops, examines, and moves on from like waypoints on the journey as they continue to move forward and explore new ideas.
For ideas that are explored a bit more, the longest tracks on the album include two four-minute songs and one ten-minute song.
Track #3 “Password” slowly raises the temperature with sugary bursts of carbonation like curved melodic strands whipping with barbed ends. Sugawa sits out for a minute before rumbling in with fast nonstop bass lines underneath.
The three-part “Mokume” series (tracks #4, #8, and #10) has a particular impact. Clarinet and bowed cello notes play an almost modern classical piece before intermittently droning against one another. Consonance and dissonance slide around like oil and water shifting in a laboratory dish, flowing and touching but unmerging. Musical tones shift, intersect, tangle, and separate like frictional sounds of gossamer silk, like cricket legs or cobweb threads rubbing together, like bubbles of Brownian motion rising from a cauldron’s brew.
The final ten-minute track #11 “Enpitsu Hiko” finds the duo expanding to a trio as the sax and bass are joined by piccolo trumpet (played by Niran Dasiki). Playful mayhem is entertained as the trio balances on a tightrope of unity and disarray. Roaming improvisation leads to unintelligible scrambles of speech and juggling of squeaks, pitches, and volume before ending with a satisfyingly clear, slightly bluesy conclusion.
Oxymoron by Akihiro Yoshimoto & Takashi Sugawa
Akihiro Yoshimoto - soprano sax, clarinet
Takashi Sugawa - cello, contrabass
Niran Dasiki - piccolo trumpet (track #10)
Released in 2017 on MOR Records as MOR-1002
Japanese names: Akihiro Yoshimoto 吉本章紘 (Yoshimoto Akihiro) Takashi Sugawa 須川崇志 (Sugawa Takashi)
Related Albums
Akihiro Yoshimoto Quartet: Moving Color (2015)
Akihiro Yoshimoto Quartet: 64 Charlesgate (2022)
Audio and Video
Excerpt from “Mokume #1”, track #4 on this album:
As an aside, this so-called or apparent randomness is something that must be some part of the challenge of playing free jazz that doesn’t just sound like randomness: the musicians must consciously hurdle over or push back against instincts honed by endless hours of accurate drilling and correct practice that have set certain rules and patterns in concrete, both in the mind and muscle memory… to constantly and attentively resist the pull of falling back to using common scale patterns and licks, home keys, chord progressions, and forms that become unconscious gravitational forces for the experienced jazz musicians who have played through and memorized hundreds of standard tunes.