Kaoru Abe & Yasukazu Sato - "Akashia No Ame Ga Yamu Toki" - Jazz - ЖИВОЕ - Albums

Abe Kaoru

An independent film director by the name of Wakamatsu Kohji undertook a film based on the lives of Abe Kaoru and his wife Suzuki Izumi, a popular writer. The film was released in 1995 and has been drawing much attention from young audiences. Sax player Abe Kaoru, who died in 1978 of a drug overdose, and left behind many other legends, was a sole charismatic figure in the world of Japanese free jazz. During his lifetime he released a mere 3 or 4 records, yet there have been more than ten CDs released of his solo live performances posthumously. All of these have sold well for free music recordings, and there are at least three books written about him. Abe Kaoru continues to be a social phenomenon in the underground world after his death.

The first gig that I ever paid to see was in fact Abe Kaoru, at a jazz kissa in Fukushima. I was a high school student at the time, and his all-improvised performance on alto and soprano sax was something beyond my comprehension. But his feedback noise performance using the electric guitar that I happened to have that day was perhaps one of the things that led to my starting free music myself. As a teenager watching his performance, I know I must have thought, "I could do something like this".

This solo performance was recorded on video, and I have since had the opportunity once or twice to see this private document. Seeing it from my own vantage today, the sax he played seems to be a certain pure kind of punk, rather than free jazz or free improvisation.

Abe appeared on the scene in the late 60s, at the age of 20. In the 1970s he met Takayanagi through one of the most aggressive and progressive music critics of that time, Aquilax Aida. There remains a single document of their performances together, Kaitaiteki Kohkan, of which only 300 were pressed. The improvisation by the two musicians on this record is much too noisy and extreme to be called free improvisation.

While Takayanagi's purpose lay in honing his improvisational language upon a groundwork of noise, born from his cool observations of society, Abe was concerned with the physicality of the saxophone, and asserting himself as a social phenomenon in the midst of the socio-political climate of the 1970s. This was, looking back on it now, similar to the charisma of rock music or punk.

Alongside many opposing sects in the 1970s Tokyo free jazz scene, Abe eventually came to fall out with Takayanagi, and until his death in 1978 he continued to live a life of solo performances and habitual drugs. I myself cannot relate to his decadent lifestyle, but I can say that his music was what planted the seeds of my later interest in punk and noise music.


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