THIS
IS THE STORY OF THE COMPLETE MUSICIAN. Or fairly complete ÐÐ Ryuichi Sakamoto
would say he's only begun his search for the definitive sound. And that'd
be saying something, coming from a man with a rather astounding number of
achievements spanning the realms of film and television soundtracks
(Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; The Last Emperor; Wild Palms; The Sheltering Sky; High Heels; The Handmaid's Tale;
Snake Eyes; Love Is the Devil; many more); techno-pop
(Yellow Magic Orchestra); grand-scale operas; collaborations with
avant-garde poets, players and DJs; and the opening music for the 1992
Barcelona Olympics.
Over the phone from
Tokyo, Sakamoto sounds matter-of-fact about his scroll of career
highlights. It's this brand of cool that, for example, has allowed him to
interpret so persuasively the airy mysteries of Antonio Carlos Jobim on a
sterling disc called Casa (Sony Classical), as a pianist in empathetic collaboration
with Brazilians Jaques Morelenbaum (cello) and Paula Morelenbaum (voice).
Sakamoto finds an affinity with the sensuously bittersweet soul of Brazil,
and with Jobim: The path of beauty and substance is common to all three.
As he negotiates the
misleadingly pretty twists, turnarounds and surprises, Sakamoto performs
alongside the Morelenbaums on these hitherto unheard Jobim works with such
intricacy and poise as to be translucent. The composer's charts left plenty
of room for expansion.
The piano playing
on this album is a reflection of the way Jobim played," says Sakamoto.
"Since the first time I heard the bossa nova, the thing that struck me
most was his touch ÐÐ it sounded almost like Zen, and not only the spaces
between the notes, but the timbre, the kind of filtered sound of the piano. It's
like a meditation."
At the recording
sessions, which took place in Jobim's house on the outskirts of Rio,
Sakamoto played Jobim's actual piano, which must've engendered a sense of
obligation. You can hear Sakamoto channeling the master's spirit.
"You could see his
fingerprints on the keyboard," he says. "You know, it's almost
sacred ÐÐ you can't touch. But I did."
Brazilian sambas and
bossa novas often come off mushy and insipid, usually owing to performers'
aloofness to the material's wily strategies. Sakamoto, though, grounded not
only in the French "impressionist" composers such as Debussy,
Ravel and Satie but also in ethnic musics and electronic composition, has
the qualifications ÐÐ high intelligence, good taste ÐÐ to play Jobim's music.
And his own compositions reflect a superwide harmonic/melodic/timbral range
he developed by listening to everything: "Paul McCartney and John
Lennon,
Johann Sebastian Bach, Brahms, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, Stravinsky,
Olivier Messiaen, gamelan, African tribes," he says.
For many years at least
one of Sakamoto's avid pursuits has been beauty ÐÐ how to perfect and
redefine it. (He even titled his 1990 solo album with the word.) But he's
also striven for intellectual rigor, content. His work has addressed
beauty in overtly lush European ways, and in the more, say, Japanese way of
exploring empty spaces to draw power from unstated emotions. He has
absorbed a great variety of music. But these days he's not such a feverish
student.
Into my 20s, of
course I was interested in other people's music, but I was not interested
in establishing my own style. That's why I took a path to one thing, then
to other things. And that was fun, and that confused my listeners a lot.
But now, probably for the first time in my life, I'm looking for something
of my own."
So what clues the
musician toward his own destined road? "I don't have any particular
approach," he says. "Ideas come to me whenever ÐÐ when I watch CNN,
or I'm reading a book or doing photography." When the song strikes, he
usually has something at hand to capture it with. "Driving a car, I
don't have any device except a cellular phone. So I call my house, and I
put a melody or some idea onto my own answering machine."
Sakamoto
has enjoyed a smallish sideline as a face, with memorable roles in Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; The Last Emperor (his score for the latter earning him an Oscar
and a Golden Globe award); and Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel. That was Sakamoto playing
"the Director" in Madonna's "Rain" video, and you've
seen him draped stylishly in ads for Barneys New York, fashion designer
Antonio Miro and the Gap. His sullenly handsome charisma seems a natural
for the silver screen, but he found the acting life disheartening.
"I decided not to
take roles after The Last Emperor. I like movies, but I'm a really bad
actor."
But his performance in Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was...
"So bad. People can't
see my consciousness on the screen. That's really annoying. The only film
director who could pull me out is Jean-Luc Godard."
Sakamoto's Web site
reveals that he's not an artist who lives in a plastic bubble. Www.sitesakamoto.com is a valuable source of
activist links concerned with militarism, terrorism and retaliation,
nuclear proliferation, economic exploitation of the Third World, the
environment, and numerous geopolitical issues; it's also a forum for
intellectual-property rights. Yet his art doesn't strike one as politically
motivated.
"I think everybody
is influenced by political issues, whether he's interested or not,"
says Sakamoto. "I try to put my feelings about those issues in my
music; I don't like to put social or political messages onto my music."
Sakamoto was moved when
he witnessed in person the fall of the World Trade Center, and now "I
feel some responsibility to do something." Though he has long disliked
using his name to promote causes, last year Sakamoto recorded a single,
"Zero Landmine," to benefit the HALO Trust, which raised millions
of dollars for that organization's land-mine-removal campaign.
"I was tired of
being tired," he says. "In Japan, almost all musicians and
artists are still very quiet, not political. I was like that; I was
involved in the late-'60s student movements, and I saw a lot of bad things,
and I was traumatized. But that project with the land mines was very
fascinating, because I had to re-see myself as a musician."
Sakamoto's
restless. While he's proved he can beat the band in most musical settings,
at age 50 he's on the prowl for meaningful modes of expression, new
technologies that can alter the way we experience music and sound itself.
1999 found him exploring digital interactivity with the star-studded opera
Webcast Life,
which allowed viewers to convey in real time their approval or disdain. His
video-and-animation-enhanced CD project Discord (with guests DJ Spooky,
Laurie Anderson, Bernardo Bertolucci, Banana Yoshimoto, David Byrne, Patti
Smith, David Torn and others) is a marvel of user-participatory potential.
Recent performances have seen Sakamoto applying his encyclopedic knowledge
of composition theory and pop, ethnic and electronic history to the art of
deejaying.
"I've been doing a
kind of laptop deejaying. Instead of using turntables and CD players, I've
got a lot of audio files in my hard disk, with some digital programs.
Basically, it's the same as deejaying, but virtual, software-based. I could
have 10, 12 different turntables at the same time on my desktop, playing
and mixing at the same time. No blueprints or anything ÐÐ it's all
spontaneous. And it's so free."
While he'll continue
his scoring work in several upcoming big- and small-scale films, including
the prize-winning documentary Derrida and Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale, freedom of expression, in
the end, is what Sakamoto's all about. And, he says, time is of the
essence.
"All music is
still based on measurements, and I'm losing interest in that. I wish I could
have a program or software where the musical space can be a canvas. I just
put, like, some painting from Mir˜, I put some color here, and some shapes
here, like a painting, without thinking too much about structure based on
time. Because we are still trapped by the flow of time in music, and this
limitation is so strong, for all kinds of composers, like punk rock, rap,
classical ÐÐ we are like a slave of time.
