Featured

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I

03/29/2016 by Manny Santiago Leave a Comment

“In the Perfected Mahayana – everything, every speck of dust even, can be seen as conditioned arising. Thus even in a hair there are innumerable golden lions.”- Tractate of the Golden Lion — Fazang

My friend Tomohiro once asked me why I was living in Japan, “You not married, don’t have girlfriend, not getting paid shit-ton cash like finance assholes, have no real prospects, kind of smell bad…so why you come to Japan…for the sushi?”

“Tomo, I’m seeking satori…duh.”

“You drink too much beer for satori. Even you run bar you drink all the profit, so why you wanna be Buddhist?”

Actually I get this question a lot. Japanese people are curious about an outsider’s views on what makes Japan attractive. Occasionally whomever it is I’m talking to continues the conversation with another whopper of a mystical/metaphysical/meaning-of-life type of question like, “Can you use chopsticks?” or “Wow, you sure are good at using chopsticks!”

I nod imbecilically and smile, saying, “Chinese food everywhere in America!” while adding, “Oscar Wilde said that when given a choice between going to heaven and attending a lecture on heaven, an American would attend the lecture. Because quoting Oscar Wilde to people, especially in Japanese, gets awkward quickly, the subject changes rather quickly as well.

being in a different country can always be described in terms of psychotropic drug adjectives:… Click To Tweet

The Nature of Wabi-Sabi I

Living in Japan for me is akin to the American attending the lecture. In some ways modern Japanese society is nothing if not stultifyingly dense and uniformly micro-managed, with what is said and unsaid, done and not done, suggested and implied plastered like thousands of impenetrable pieces of papier-mâché one atop another over that raw heart of natural truth. This in turn is deceptively mysterious to many western eyes, which perceive one thing yet rarely grasp the subtlety with which the underlying meaning is insinuated, and was more or less over my head when I moved to the hilly countryside of Nagano in 2001. Ooh, ooh, I thought, living like a hermit on a hilltop, going from misty mountain shrine to temple, embracing the local Zen monk’s practices while embalming myself in study of the more ancient pagan rituals of Shintō, the glue that binds the two together, making Japan one of the only countries where almost the entire population is embracing not one, but two religions, while denying that they are at all religious. Hilarious! That and, yes Tomo was right, the sushi. I couldn’t wait.

The first few days and weeks of being in a different country can always be described in terms of psychotropic drug adjectives: Eye-opening, Mind-altering, Consciousness-expanding, Confusing, Ecstatic, Terrifying, Blissful and so on. Upon arriving to my town via well-heeled train from Nagoya, a large industrial center boasting Toyota HQ, a disappointing port, massive humidity and a thriving S&M scene, but not much else on th esurface, I experienced the largest conception-breaking sense of blah thus far, like a massive fur ball you just can’t hack out. The town, situated on a lake nestled in a crevice of a mountain range hugging the Matsumoto plateau, was less than spectacular. Nagoya, full of grays and browns, too had been less than stellar, but you figure well, it’s an urban Toyota production center, the water should be polluted and the skyline full of smoke, trash everywhere and the people rude, call it Cleveland, and move on. Get me to the countryside with green pastures and pristine lakes abutting picturesque mountain ranges off in the not too far distance. Say it to yourself: Japanese countryside. What images come to mind? It’s tough to know what to expect when bred on the ethnocentric western view that samurai and geisha, among other long dead notions of the chivalrous and bloody bygone eras, still hold sway here. Of course these things, ideas, images, are still celebrated as symbols of a great culture in local festivals, holidays, television and movies, much as any country tends to glorify the good of the past while relegating the racism, civil war, genocide, and sheer malevolent human tendencies toward bloodshed, to their proper, poorly-lit corner of history. That is all well and good, but what I, California City Boy, wanted was the pastoral simplicity of centuries ago mixed with a kind of revelatory mystical experience high on an Asian hilltop with crusty old sages and their singly clapping hands, or at least that’s what I thought I wanted, or what I thought I envisioned being so. Not the polluted Suwa Lake ringed by ugly industrial buildings spewing smoke into the greasy sky peppered with a few man-made “photo opportunities” complete with patches of dead and dying grass for depressing roadside picnicking and watching the ubiquitous mobile phone towers replace swaths of trees on the nearby foothills approaching the Japan Alps. I’d rather sit on my electronically heated toilet and listen to the simulacra rushing river sounds meant to cover the embarrassment visitors (probably the Brazilian Mormons again…) would inevitably face by noises caused by my bowel movements. Can you blame me?

Growing up in crowded southern California my family and I would take occasional trips to the desert — to Indio, Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Lake Havasu — to camp and fish, get on a houseboat and laze in the lakes created by damming the west’s river arteries or occasionally just sit by the hotel pool in the dry empty 110 degree expanse. Despite not always coming home with a huge catch of fresh trout for dinner or getting massively dehydrated and sunburnt, the key to any kind of enjoyment of the desert was water. It’s a primordial instinct out of which we are born: a stream of life in the vast expanse of death. Without even the notion of water in some form — stream, river, lake, pool, slip and slide, etc. — on the horizon even as a child I knew not to expect much. This was before beer and sex had been introduced in my life, so swimming and fishing in lakes and rivers was almost all I had. Riding in the backseat of my grandparent’s gas-guzzling Ford Granada as we rolled east down Interstate 10 and the cacti started to appear, the landscape shifting from the stacked traffic and houses of the Imperial Valley to a gradually sparser and ten shades browner back country of flat mile after mile desert and mountains in the distance, I never thought about the fact that cities and lakes and everything else were made by man for a reason, nor did I imagine what those reasons might have been. Alternately dumb and curious as most children are, I always had a vision of the desert as the gateway to China and that if only I could dune dig deep enough, I would end up meeting my Chinese doppelgänger halfway and we could, I don’t know, trade shitty plastic toys. Despite the fact that digging through the earth from Death Valley would most likely land you in Great White feeding grounds off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean this notion got stuck somewhere in the ever-growing collection of unexpunged synapses clogging up my head throughout adolescence on into early manhood and, as tends to happen in life under the hallucination-inducing desert sun, got warped. Backward and wrong as it was, my vision of China — and by extension all of Asia — was that of an inverse function of my Mojave desert: raw, verdant green power, growing up and out, full of lakes and unclogged rivers, unstoppable and dangerous, untouched by man’s egotistical manifest destiny sense of entitlement due to nature’s unsurpassed tenacity and perseverance. To me, ignorant of Mao’s Great Leap Forward / Cultural Revolution, the rape of Nanjing, & the 38th Parallel, China / Japan / Korea represented the untouchable preserve, a vast swath of natural resources that as long as it remained intact would always symbolize a cushion to fall back on should we lose sight of whatever it was that drove us onward in our unquenchable search for fuel, that and to provide strength against the harsh realities of life on earth, ha ha, that one again. Yeah, at 8 years-old, I was a strange kid. All-American, but still a bit off in the head.

The fact is today, there just aren’t that many untouched territories out there anymore, even in desertifying China and as well in mountainous Japan. What we, programmed by Reagan’s 80’s network nightly news team, tended to think of as the onetime imperialist’s third world exotic Asian getaway, or rather hoped would be, our “natural” backyard of free and easy resources, has become an experiment in pork barrel construction based upon ease of stripping away vital sources of energy to power our karaoke, latte and ATM machines. Nowhere is this more sadly visible than in the middlingly developed consumer centers of Japan, from Nagano to the north, and Osaka to the south. With the cities, like smelly, sweaty and humid Nagoya, we get the armpit we expect, peopled to the brim, overheated and far too gone to do anything about (or so we think), but with Nagano we get to see an area of onetime vast wilderness in mid-metamorphosis. The strip-mining, dynamiting, clear-cutting, river-damming, concreting, tetrapodding, hillside gridding, mountain-topping is going on right now and continues to justify the existence of the overfed construction industry, itself a propped up jobs program for mafioso swindlers. As an outsider it’s an interesting thing to watch occur all around you as your elderly neighbors in their sardine-packed apartments regularly boast of Japan as a country of natural beauty. I don’t disagree, I just wonder what they mean by “natural”.

The term wabi-sabi is often dropped by people when describing Japan or something Japanese. Despite it being a Japanese phrase, many Japanese people I’ve talked to have little or no understanding of the concept at all and sum it up like my friend Tomo, “In order to understand Japanese wabi-sabi, you need foreigners to explain to you.”

“Why Tomo, why?”

“This shit old Buddha concept man, modern Jap work 12 hours, wear suit, eat hamburger, drink Starbucks, buy fucking Gucci and Louis Vuitton, you know Asian-American? It’s you white people, Richard Gere-san, love this old Buddhist shit.”

If it weren’t negated by speaking of it, as in any basic Buddhist tenet, simply put, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic appreciation of the understated asymmetric beauty of the ephemeral. Wabi and Sabi are actually separate words, rooted in both Shintō and Zen aesthetics. Wabi (侘), coming from Wa (meaning harmony), refers to a poetic kind of simplicity or distilledness, while Sabi (寂) refers to a declining elegance. The word for rust, also Sabi (though using the character 錆) has a similar nuance: the slow and inevitable erosion of time. In a word: impermanence. I have come to understand it from pestering my friends (who never know) and any older people I meet at the neighborhood sake bar (which always elicits a friendly laugh) as being a kind of interplay between “nature” and “society”, the ubiquitous plant vines spreading across the facades of old buildings, the muted flaws of handmade ceramic ware, a karesansui rock garden. Whereas I have always seen wabi-sabi as space and time, respectively, and exemplified in nature itself as the growth of moss on a tree, the intricate and imperfect patterning of wild mushrooms, the way waves crest and trough in the sea. Whichever is correct, the fact remains that man’s perceived dominance over nature is at the root of the discussion and the Japanese are at the center of any debate of how the culture which gave rise to the wabi-sabi aesthetic (though not necessarily directly) has gone on to irrevocably waste precious resources and help alter the world’s natural landscape. The earth, despite being the giver of life, is an admittedly tough place to eke out an existence and this archipelago of roughly 2000 islands, while blessed with some of the most beautiful forests and mountain ranges in the world — Nagano’s Japan Alps being one of them — is especially wild and unforgiving. From the ubiquitous Japanese gardener in Hollywood films to the national obsession with bonsai trees and the relentless manipulation of all aspects of nature in general, a proper look into wabi-sabi required me to start looking at a cursory examination of the ascendancy of Buddhism in Japan in relation to nature and society. So I started asking questions. Then it got weird.

Libraries in rural Japan may have an English language section, filled with Tom Clancy and Curious George and, much like a liquor stores selection of bourbons you have never heard of, offer dubious harlequin pulp full of pulsating members and heaving breasts. This begs the question, “Is this crap published with a large red stamp “Export Only”…?” Fun for a laugh, but just as useless as thumbing through any text on Buddhism, should you even be able to find one, if your kanji literacy rate wallows below 400 characters: an effort in futility. Coupled with the recent internet bubble just having burst worse than Japanese venture capital conglomerates attempts at buying Pebble Beach and 30 Rock in the 80s, online education portals were pretty sparse in the early 2000s and desperately in need of Web 2.0 design aesthetics, what with their scrolling Comic Sans typeface outlined in day-glo edging across flashing headers, images of a pixelated Buddha spinning in GIF ecstasy, mile-long URLs with nonsensical alphanumeric combinations, as if encoded to hide the divine knowledge they offered, but only to a select few…

So with a bottle of the affordable yet tasty Black Nikka Whisky as my partner in crime I stayed home and took advantage of Buddhism via airmail and early Amazon Japan discounts on shipping, and sought out a two-pronged attack of Alan Watts Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion and Joseph Campbell’s Sake & Satori. Hitting just the right balance with Watts’ beery enlightenment and Campbell’s erudite scholasticism made for entertaining education, especially on something so intimate as personal theological development, and by way of books written by outsiders, no less. It has always seemed to me that when I am most in tune with the divine nature of the world I have been outdoors: hiking in the Sierra Nevada or swimming in the Gulf of Siam. It has always felt antithetical to me the discovery of reading of the wonders of the world rather than racing around and finding one’s own. That said, I have read my fair share on the marvels of nature, and it has led me to blossom out of my Californian desert cocoon.

In a nutshell, Buddhism can in some sense be seen as exported Hinduism. Whereas Hinduism was more than just a religion — largely a culture featuring more than just religious practices but also social castes and institutions — Buddhism came about as a way to the teachings of the Buddha for the non-Hindu world. The first type we see is Theravada (Doctrine of the Saints), a mostly monastic form closely related to Jainism, stressing the teaching of analysis, where Nirvana is achieved by experience, investigation and insight. Another form of this is Hīnayāna (Lesser Vessel) whereby Nirvana is achieved by abandoning society and embracing ascetic hardships. At this point in history (around 500 BCE) all Buddhist art is not of the Buddha himself but of the idea of the Buddha, his symbology (i.e. the Lotus) and bigfoot-esque Buddha footprints, etc. This is because of the heavy reliance on the early depiction of the Buddha as disengaged from his body, disengaged from time. He was Nonentity, Buddha Consciousness, God not in the world.

The Buddha’s hand touching the earth is called Akshobya — to not be moved — imperturbable. This is the original form of Buddhism, disengaged from the field of time, a difficult path largely undertaken by the Hīnayānic monks of India, but not meant for regular joes. The next form would be merely to realize that it is possible to be engaged in the field of time while not being moved. Understanding that life amidst the seeming infinite number of opposites which are actually poles of one another and coexist in a necessary harmony is the Mahayāna, one could arguably say the most popular form of Buddhism in north-east Asia (China, Korea, Japan). As opposed to the attempts by the few to throw off life, to discard the impure body, to free the mind, eventually around 100 CE many people came to realize that this was not necessary, that one could, and does, exist in both realms. This is Buddhism for the masses.

Circa 1st century CE, the Buddha in the form of Man began to be represented in art of all kinds. This art signaled the next phase in Buddhism called Mahāyāna (Greater Vessel). The ethos shifted toward a sense of the Buddha who, while being disengaged from Time, is also engaged in it, as God in the world – a kindly superhero Jesus. People are getting the idea of the oneness of everything, Yin and Yang, space and time, and key in this is the Buddha’s teaching of the “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world”. We — you, me, everything — can possess both Buddha consciousness and be present in the world, simultaneously disengaged and engaged from time. Once the Buddha achieves Nirvana, that is to say realizes the Om oneness of everything, he knows that he is not here, yet also realizes there is nowhere but here. There is no distinction. Nirvana, therefore, is everywhere. One need not submit to ascetic monasticism to achieve enlightenment, but rather delve into the world around, and inside, us. Phew, that was close.

In my search for the path toward understanding what the connection between enlightenment and nature, a friend tossed me a bone, in the form of On the Golden Lion, an obscure essay by the Central Asian Buddhist Fa-tsang which dates to around 700 CE. He was a practitioner of Flower Garland Buddhism, which states that the nature of the infinite can be seen in the infinitesimal. He illustrates this using a statuette of a golden lion. The carving of each aspect of the lion — the teeth, the mane, the tail, et al — represents the various phenomena of the universe — stars, planets, black holes, et al — all different in appearance. Yet their unifying characteristic is that they are made of the same material: gold. “Conditioned arising” refers to the seemingly separate nature of everything in the universe: contrived, opposite, unattached: sushi is sushi and planets are planets, but both are made of stardust. Yet in reality, since the universe is composed of in this case gold — gold ears, gold teeth, gold scrotum — all is one, be it gold or sushi. The Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra says that the differences are all superficial, and that I should accept that the polluted lake is as sacred as the sushi I so love. Thinking is the problem. But like Tomo always said, “Stop thinking so much man, just enjoy the view!”

Citations:

– Campbell, Joseph & Kudler, David (2002). Sake & Satori. New World Library
– Carter, Robert Edgar (2007). The Japanese arts and self-cultivation. Suny Press
– Fa-tsang (700CE), On the Golden Lion
– Johnson, Norris Brock (1991). Zuisen Temple and Garden, Kamakura, Japan: Design Form and Phylogenetic Meaning. Journal of Garden History
– Koren, Leonard (1994). Wabi Sabi for artists, designers, poets and philosophers. Berkley, CA: Stone Bridge Press
– McCormack, Gavan (1996). The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. M.E. Sharpe
– Plutschow, Herbert (1999). An Anthropological Perspective on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Anthropoetics 5, no. 1
– Sasaki, Genjun (1992) Linguistic Approach to Buddhist Thought. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers
– Tachibana, Toshitsunawe (Ca. 1000CE) Sakuteiki
– Watts, Alan (1999) Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion. Tuttle Publishing
– Young David & Michiko, (2005) The Art of the Japanese Garden. Tuttle Publishing
– Dig to China – http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php
– Jōdo shū – http://www.jodo.org/teachings/nembutsu.html
– Shogoin Temple, Kyoto, Japan – http://www.shugendo.fr/
– Taylor, Jiro The Waribashi Conundrum – http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=361&pID=375
– TED Case Studies – http://www1.american.edu/TED/chopstik.htm
– Web Japan (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs) – http://web-japan.org/

Spanish Food Road Trip – The Good The Bad The Ugly

03/06/2016 by Arnaud De Grave Leave a Comment

Spanish Food Road Trip – The Good The Bad The Ugly

Day 1-2 – Driving through Spain, not Portugal yet, so not the fastest way to get there, but still rushing, go figure…So the whole idea about the first part of the trip is to get to the south of Portugal as fast as possible. Then go up slowly and then get to France via Bilbao or so, then rush back. Therefore (and this is funny, you’ll see), I’m going to go north of Madrid via Contreras, which is a very very very small and lost village close by Barbadillo del Mercado, already far away from it all… You see, it’s to go to a fake cemetery. You don’t see? Alright, first things first, a recollection on how we got there, where we slept and, of course, what we ate.

The first day started at my parents’, in Fitou, France and it was a mad dash towards Soria, passing through Catalonia (but avoiding carefully Barcelona, been there, done that…) and then the Aragon autonomous community (something like the aggregation of three provinces, with some sort of capital in Zaragosa). We did not care much for food or drinks in that part of the trip, to the point of taking a lunch and picnicking somewhere unmemorable. The point was to find a hotel as close to Contreras (with still good aperitif, yes, and dinner, yes) to go to the cemetery in the morning. There is nothing much to say for the landscape except that we saw an incredible amount of pigsties. I never saw so many pigsties in my entire life. Granted there were decent amount of cows and oxen and sheep around, grazing and all… But pigsties, large ones, were everywhere.

One thing leading to another I found myself in a small bar for una cerveza de barril while the Moms is “descansando” in the room of a nice hotel, small to the point of tininess. However they did have a restaurant and we were given the choice for three primeros and three segundos, not to mention at least four or five dulces. I’m fairly certain we were the only people in the place. The menu was as follows:

Menestra de verduras (The Moms, some sort of vegetable stew with lard in it, delicious I was led to believe it was…)
Esparragos a la plancha con jamon (Yours truly, asparagus on that typical grill they have which is basically a flattop grill… with some local ham thrown in for good measure, nice)
Carrillera iberica a la plancha con pimientos de Piquillo (both, some pork bits, also on the flattop grill with fries and a grilled red bell pepper that even I, who really hate bell pepper with all my heart, ate. Go figure)
Flan de huevo con nata (The Moms, egg flan, typical, delicious…)
Espuma de chocolate (Yours truly, chocolate mousse, perfect.)
All that with a tinto de la casa, a Rioja. Needless to say I did not finish the bottle… I am not a big fan of Rioja wine usually but this one was obviously a local favourite as the waiter almost drooled when describing it. It was very potent but not too much. It went well with the little bits of jamon with a drop of very very strong olive oil on top that appeared out of nowhere when we were waiting for the primeros.

I wanted to go out after and get a beer, as I did before dinner but I was not in any shape to do anything. Shame though, as the town square sported no less than seven (7!) bars, for such a small town, my Frenchnessness was pleased. Yes, that is a thing.

I will dream of colts and cowboy hats, cigars and nooses, horses and graves... Click To Tweet

Espuma de chocolate – chocolate mousse

Sardines and the ever lovely Cuttlefish, man do I love that thing…

Tortillas!

Carrillera iberica a la plancha con pimientos de Piquillo – Iberica Pork bits with Piquillo Peppers

Esparragos a la plancha con jamon – Grilled Asparagus & Thinly Sliced Cured Ham

Fries!

The next day I almost cried because the weather was so grey and foggy I couldn’t see the houses on the other side of the street, and I do not think that two cars could cross. My dream of Sad Hill Cementario was going down the drain…

My mood was a bit lifted by the brief encounter with some ciconias (white storks), a personal favourite, possibly from the good old La Fontaine’s tales… One of these birds flew over the car for a while, I was a bit scared for my hood’s paint but it was overall a nice experience. And to be honest I do not really care about my hood. We took off, following the maps blindly, even when it seemed to lead us to literally nowhere. Contreras, as previously mentioned, is a hole. And when you get there there is still some 5km of dirt road to drive on until you reach the sign: “Sad Hill Cementario”. I think I was in a trance the whole half-hour we spent there: me shooting some insane amount of pictures with at least five (5!) different cameras and the Moms trying not to freeze. For those of you lacking the proper culture (shame on you little grasshopper) and who did not do the standard googling, this place is the set for the amazing Sergio Leone film, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), particularly the über-famous final scene when there is a three-way duel (triel?) in this very Sad Hill Cementario. I had to go there on a pilgrimage. Period. It was worth it. I think a large print of a picture I shot that day will adorn my living room, when I have a living room.

The rest of the day I couldn’t care less. We drove. A lot.

We had Tortillas Francesas, (meaning plain for some reason) and con jamon in a cafeteria in a gas station.

We drove, a lot more.

We left the autovia (free highway) around Zafra (some hundreds km north of Sevilla) to go once again in the countryside and ended in Fregenal de la Sierra. We found a cheapo hotel, as usual. We went around town for a cervecita and dug a small place for tapas and, for a wee bunch of euros (A few dollars more?), we had two kinds of seafood (sardines and the ever lovely cuttlefish, man do I love that thing) and three kinds of meat (mostly pork though, probably in relation to the insane amount of pigsties we kept on seeing on the road), and some local wine… I was content anyhow. I will dream of colts and cowboy hats, cigars and nooses, horses and graves…

And tomorrow we cross the border and get to Portugal, where the real trip begins.

Big Bull Tailgating on the Road

A brief encounter with some Ciconias (white storks), a personal favourite, possibly from the good old La Fontaine’s tales…

The set for the amazing Sergio Leone movie The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), particularly the über-famous last scene when they duel by three

Spanish Small town shutdown

Spanish Clouds Overhead…

Sad Hill Cementario – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

07/24/2015 by Manny Santiago Leave a Comment

The Beard – EP 109 – Sleater-Kinney by Beard Radio on Mixcloud

Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

Publishing this feels like something that is so hard to do for so many reasons. The album came out 6 months ago. Every major site has already reviewed it. It’s old news. Who gives a shit what I say? Etc. The truth is it has taken me six months to think of anything to say. Why? Because this album, like all of their other albums, hits so hard it leaves one speechless. There are no words to express the way these ladies get together and make music. It’s best to hear it and then experience whatever it is that comes. But do yourself a favor — hear it in the appropriate fashion: live in concert. Or if you can’t make a show, get the vinyl and some great headphones. Or with friends and family. Only listen to my radio show if you are driving somewhere, or at worse you’re on a train. Movement is key. Wind. Water. Better yet, here’s some stuff the ladies themselves have to say about the first album out in a decade.

“Creativity is about where you want your blood to flow, because in order to do something meaningful and powerful there has to be life inside of it,” says Brownstein. “Sleater-Kinney isn’t something you can do half-assed or half-heartedly. We have to really want it. This band requires a certain desperation, a direness. We have to be willing to push because the entity that is this band will push right back.”

“The core of this record is our relationship to each other, to the music, and how all of us still felt strongly enough about those to sweat it out in the basement and to try and reinvent our band,” says Tucker.

Kyoto Jazz Massive Turns 20

06/26/2015 by Manny Santiago Leave a Comment

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

–Charles Mingus

Kyoto Jazz Massive on a Blue Note Mission by Beard Radio on Mixcloud

Inventions & Dimensions - Herbie Hancock — *Inventions & Dimensions* (1964) is the third album by Herbie Hancock, featuring Herbie Hancock – piano, Paul Chambers – bass, Willie Bobo – drums, timbales, and Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez – percussion (not on track 5).

In order to define the new album Mission by Kyoto Jazz Sextet (Blue Note Japan, 2015), and the renaissance of Crossover Jazz in Japan one needs to step back into the past. Specifically into the back catalogues of Blue Note Records. Started by Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion in the 30s, the jazz label became known for producing some of the most infamous hard-bop albums of the 60s. Wolff was known for taking photos of artists during studio sessions, sometimes obtrusively, and getting great work in the process. His iconic photos fill the album covers of the Blue Note Discography. Which begs the question, what are the roots of Shuya Okino’s Crossover Jazz empire? Where did it come from? How is it coming to define 21st-century Tokyo and the world beyond?

Jazz transformed from Ragtime to Swing to Bebop before it entered the pivotal era of the 50s and 60s. Miles Davis Birth of the Cool Modal revolution and its West Coast and Bossa Nova tendencies spread from the east coast of the US, across the country and throughout the world. Along with Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Pharaoh Sanders, Ornette Coleman pioneered the improvisational brand of Free Jazz that led to Soul, Fusion and Funk. The instrumental basis of swing had already been wildly popularized abroad, and its ability to cross into lands across the globe without passport made it one of the quickest music genres to evolve into a music any country could call their own. While jazz may have been an exclusively American invention, by the late 60s it truly had become the world music.

Jazz has been big in Japan for a century. Fumio Nanri, Ryoichi Hattori, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Yosuke Yamshita, Tadao Watanabe, to name a few, were all stellar musicians in their own right who sought to overcome criticisms of being derivative. Anyone can play a horn, pluck a bass, strum a guitar or pound a snaredrum, and a vast majority of Japanese jazz musicians were able to do so, finding themselves to be almost freakishly good at technical playing, but were missing the intangible touch of flair that was new and exciting, the j’ai ne sais quoi still good enough to remind fans of the masters from before. Music thirsts for artistry beyond mere musical ability. Jazz needs soul.

Kyoto Jazz Massive - Spirit of the Sun — *Spirit of the Sun* (2004) by Kyoto Jazz Massive features Shuya Okino, Yoshihiro Okino, Yasushi Kurobane, and Hajime Yoshizawa

Enter Shuya and Yoshi Okino. Looking backward has never been the Okino brothers forte. They are too forward facing to do so. Yet unable to escape the grand sounds coming out of the past, they have opted for their own special brand of break beat jazz. DJing, composing, arranging, supervising and producing music, they are not a group in the traditional sense. They don’t put out albums the way the music industry wants artists to do. They work at their own pace with numerous talented people across the vast panopoly of the musicsphere, like pianist and producer Hajime Yoshizawa and composer and saxophonist Naruyoshi Kikuchi. Seriously, these guys love to play live. They DJ. They run a record label / music shop. They come to get down. Releasing studio albums can wait.

They formed Kyoto Jazz Massive as a DJ unit in the early 90s, releasing the compilation Kyoto Jazz Massive V.A.. But between running a Tokyo nightclub (Shuya Okino is the owner of The Room, the influential Club Jazz/Crossover music club in Shibuya), and a record label Especial Records (Yoshi Okino operates Especial in Osaka, putting out albums by Root Soul, Sleep Walker, and Hajime Yoshizawa, Dj Kawasaki), the brothers came to the attention of a worldwide audience in a prime moment just before the release of Kyoto Jazz Massive’s first single, “Eclipse” and the release of the subsequent album Spirit of the Sun (Compost Records, 2002), when they were popularized (and named) by the BBC Radio 1 DJ Gilles Peterson in 2001. They began to tour, bringing the best Crossover Jazz to the Americas, Europe and Asia in a soulful effort to bridge musical as well as cultural divides. You can get a sense of how audiences might feel while seeing a slickly dressed DJ revving up the turntables opposite trumpeters and trombonists tuning up. It’s a bit befuddling. But once the warbles turn to warm notes and the band begins to lock in step it is easy to see how the scene has grown to encapsulate an eclectic ensemble of the best live jazz musicians in conjunction with mad beat architecture: two of the things Shuya Okino holds dear.

In our interview with Shuya he recalls a live show he played in France more than a decade ago:

We played Hiphop, Jazz, House, Techno, Brazil, Latin, Africa, Disco, Boogie, Drum n’ Bass, Break beats, Soul, Funk, Arabian & so on. But in France I’d heard that Club Jazz is a difficult thing. I guess what left an impression on me was when I visited in 2000 thinking that nobody would come. What I can’t forget to this day is the rush of the packed venue and the open-minded audience.

Kyoto Jazz Massive Turns 20

Much like the ethos of Free Jazz, Shuya’s Crossover Jazz places the emphasis on improvisation via new technology. Yet that the technology does not define the music is what is so masterful. The latest package, called Kyoto Jazz Sextet, was created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the formation of Kyoto Jazz Massive. Mission features seven songs selected from 1963 to 1966 to reflect the distinct Blue Note sound of the period. Herbie Hancock, Waybe Shorter, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson and Hank Mobley were all prominent musicians for Blue Note and the nature of these times and songs not only allows for improvisation, it begs for it. Yusuke Hirado (Piano – Quasimode), Ruike Shinpei (Trumpet – DCPRG), Takeshi Kurihara (Tenor Sax – Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro), Koizumi “P” Yoshihito (Bass – Matsuura Toshio presents HEX) and Masanori Amakura (Drums) (joined by Kikuchi Naruyoshi on “Speak No Evil” and “Eclipse”) play vintage musical instruments throughout the recording. Eventually mastering and editing the results using analog methods, the band takes the homage to trad jazz to the next level, crossing-over with samples, loops, mash-ups and improvisation, all by the musicians themselves without post-production digital input. Complicated yet sounding so simple, it’s gorgeous. Closing out this tribute to mid-60s Blue Note era is the Kyoto Jazz Massive track ‘Eclipse’, featuring acclaimed saxophonist Kikuchi Naruyoshi (also plays on “Speak No Evil”). Apart from his usual arranging and production duties, Shuya actually plays as a member of the live band, which is at the heart of Crossover. During live shows at The Room in Shibuya members of the sextet frequently change, often giving more intimate versions of big band live shows.

Track List

Kyoto Jazz Massive Turns 20 — Kyoto Jazz Sextet – Mission

1. Search for the New Land (Lee Morgan)
2. Speak No Evil (Wayne Shorter)
3. The Melting Pot (Freddie Hubbard)
4. Succotash (Herbie Hancock)
5. Mr. Jin (Wayne Shorter)
6 Jinrikisha (Joe Henderson)
7. Up a Step (Hank Mobley)
8. Eclipse (Kyoto Jazz Massive)

Produced by Shuya Okino
Co-produced by Kenichi Ikeda (Root Soul)
Supervised by Yoshihiro Okino

All songs arranged by Shuya Okino & Kenichi Ikeda, except
2 by Shuya Okino, Kenichi Ikeda & Takeshi Kurihara
4 by Shuya Okino, Kenichi Ikeda & Yusuke Hirado

Shuya adds, “As for the next album, because it depends on my brother as well, I can’t really say, but isn’t it amusing we only put one out every 10 years?”

If you’re not in Japan, and nowhere near KJM’s next tour, you should get the album (from Especial Records) now.

Search for the New Land (1964) is a hard-bop album by jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, recorded in 1964 with Herbie Hancock – piano, Grant Green – guitar, Reggie Workman – bass, Billy Higgins – drums and, Wayne Shorter – tenor sax.

No Room For Squares by Hank Mobley (1963) features Hank Mobley – tenor saxophone, Lee Morgan – trumpet, Donald Byrd – trumpet, Andrew Hill – piano, Herbie Hancock – piano, John Ore – bass, Butch Warren – bass, Philly Joe Jones – drums

Kyoto Jazz Sextet – Mission

Inventions & Dimensions (1964) is the third album by Herbie Hancock, featuring Herbie Hancock – piano, Paul Chambers – bass, Willie Bobo – drums, timbales, and Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez – percussion (not on track 5).

Spirit of the Sun (2004) by Kyoto Jazz Massive features Shuya Okino, Yoshihiro Okino, Yasushi Kurobane, and Hajime Yoshizawa

Indestructible (1965) by drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, featuring Lee Morgan — trumpet, Curtis Fuller — trombone, Wayne Shorter — tenor saxophone, Cedar Walton — piano, Reggie Workman — bass, and Art Blakey — drums

Blue Spirits (1965) is the tenth album by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard released on the Blue Note label. Freddie Hubbard – trumpet, James Spaulding – alto saxophone, Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone, Hank Mobley – tenor saxophone, Hosea Taylor – alto saxophone, Harold Mabern – piano, Herbie Hancock – piano, McCoy Tyner – piano, Bob Cranshaw – bass, Reggie Workman – bass, Larry Ridley – bass, Big Black – congas, Kiane Zawadi – euphonium, Clifford Jarvis – drums, Pete LaRoca – drums, Elvin Jones – drums

Speak No Evil (1964) by Wayne Shorter shows a photo of his first wife, Teruka (Irene) Nakagami, was released on Blue Note in 196 featuring Wayne Shorter — tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard — trumpet, Herbie Hancock — piano, Ron Carter — double bass, and Elvin Jones — drums

Page One (1963) is the debut release by American jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, featuring Kenny Dorham – trumpet, Joe Henderson – tenor saxophone, Pete La Roca – drums, McCoy Tyner – piano, and Butch Warren – double bass

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar

05/26/2015 by Arnaud De Grave Leave a Comment

What is race? How does it work? For example, what does humanity’s racist tendencies of the past have to do with current economic world order? Ethnology assumes that race and racism are extremely powerful social and cultural forces at work everywhere in the world. And that we, as humans, seek lessons for generalizing about modern society and the contemporary global order. But specific questions need to be asked too: what are the structural dimensions of race and racism (social, political, and economic inequality) and what are the cultural dimensions (artistic forms of humanistic expression, as well as politics)? How do they differ from country to country? If one were to take two island nations–Japan and Madagascar–and compare their societies, it would seem that the Malagasy would come in a far second to one of the most powerful economies as rich in cultural history as the Japanese. But why? Unfortunately the answers are never easy. But with effort and experience we hope to gain insight. Though the following article is not a comparison nor a study of two separate, unrelated countries, but rather about research and communication, we place a special focus on an old practice with a new name: ethno-photography. It will be described as an analog and digital bridge for science and communication; as a platform for resource users to showcase their points of view; and as an amplifier to research for development.

Bridging Science and Photography in Madagascar

–by Arnaud De Grave & Patrick O. Waeber

A brief glance at Madagascar

Madagascar, renowned for its unique flora and fauna, one of the hottest biodiversity hotspots on earth, has a lot to carry in terms of suffering. The nation has been through five years of a transitional administration under the leadership of a former DJ, during which economic disorder and international isolation has weighed heavily on its people. Presidential and legislative elections finally took place in Madagascar in December 2013. Hery Rajaonarimampianina, according to the New York Times the president with the longest surname in history, assumed his role on 25 January 2013. Immediately thereafter, the African Union and Southern African Development Community lifted their suspensions, followed by the European Union’s development program; monetary institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund reinstated their development funds. Hope for better times?

According to some, the power shift was merely a cosmetic make-over. The political situation remains fragile, and the new government has to deal with a lot of “challenges”, to say the least, which have been ongoing for long times, and will likely and unfortunately continue to carry on: Highest poverty rates, highest birth rates, highest school drop-outs, increasing in-transparency in governance, increasing illegal exportations of precious natural resources. Nevertheless, the new government started to take action by creating more presence in previously neglected regions in Madagascar, and according to Rajaonarimampianina’s speech on 25 September 2014 in front of the UN General Assembly in New York, declared that “Our primary goal is to bring our people out of their precarious situation” (…) “the aim…is to transform Madagascar into a food hub in the region” referring to increased investments into agriculture.

Inside Madagascar’s Bread Basket: Alaotra

In terms of rice and inland-fish production the Alaotra-Mangoro region, one of 22 in Madagascar, is the country’s current food hub. Constituting the largest wetland system, the Lake Alaotra wetland’s surrounding marshlands deliver crucial cultural and ecosystem services such as water, medicinal plants, fish stock, while hosting unique wildlife such as the Alaotra gentle lemur, a primate species living constantly in marshlands. The wetland is the third out of currently nine Ramsar sites in Madagascar since 2003 (The Ramsar Convention, is an intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources). The Malagasy government added further importance to the conservation and biodiversity values of the region by inscribing the system as new Protected Area in 2007. To be ratified as a Protected Area (the marshlands are risking to be all converted into rice fields: you burn it, you claim it, and you farm it…), a management plan, currently in the making, is badly needed.

Forests? Of course, there are also some beautiful forests full of biodiversity (more than 80% of all described animal species in Madagascar depend on forests), but they are largely locked up in parks and reserves. The rest of the landscape is dominated by agricultural production (a significant portion is also for self-subsistence, with a majority of the 550,000+ people engaging in small-scale farming), and a vast extant of open grasslands, which are low in nutrients and hence difficult to use for farming production.

Stakeholders can be the fishermen who fish in the lakes and marshes, the farmer growing fruit or… Click To Tweet

Governing the complexity

So, we have mentioned forests. Check. Outside protected areas, there are still ‘forests’, but many are degraded (or actually burned in order to be used for agriculture), and either have been transformed into something like ‘agro-forestry’ (though generally rare, and more on the ‘agro’ side than ‘forestry’), dominated by a few species such as fruit trees, or plantations. Besides being the rice granary of the island, the Alaotra is also leader in terms of plantations (with the usual suspects: acacia, eucalyptus, pine) for wood production but a lot is used also for energy consumption. Wood charcoal is still the number one energy source in Madagascar.

There are a impressive number of institutions responsible for governing the various dimensions of this complex human-environmental system: Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Water and Forests, Ministry of Fisheries, Ministry of Livestock, Ministry of Mining. There are remarkable overlaps of responsibilities requiring some coordinated planning, a challenging thing, …and you’ll also understand that communication, i.e., the receiving and delivering of information, between these institutions (but also between the decision makers and resource users on the ground) becomes a key part in this governance undertaking.

Research in the Alaotra

Given we are working in the realms of NRM (natural resources management), we first started creating an acronym (technocrats are very fond of acronyms; not that we would label ourselves as such, but we are, as said in NRM realms): “AlaReLa”, the name of our research for development project, stands for Alaotra Resilience Landscapes. In brief, this research aims to provide tools to the various stakeholders of the Alaotra human-environment system to strike a balance in the governance between development (or agricultural production thereof) and conservation (there are crucial ecosystems for biodiversity and people). Stakeholders can be the fishermen who fish in the lakes and marshes, the farmer growing fruit or cattle on the open range, as well as the any one of the heads of the Ministries deciding on regulations regarding fisheries and agriculture. This sounds very ambitious, and it probably is! Nonetheless, we, a consortium of several research and conservation institutions use a three-prong approach: understanding, exploring, communicating– with the latter being ongoing throughout the duration of the project, and beyond.

How do we do it?

Well, we talk and we listen. Sounds simple, right? To tackle the understanding portion of this research, we use a variety of disciplinary approaches (e.g., ecology, sociology, remote sensing) to create a picture of this complex human-environmental system. The exploration consists of collectively developing models (in our case role playing games and board games such as Settlers of Catan©) to test collectively agreed scenarios. For this, we sit together with the various resource users and decision makers to describe the challenges of NRM, to identify and link the key actors and resources of the system which may be prone to change (such as environmental, economic, political, etc.). In applying this participatory modeling approach, the underpinning philosophy is communication. By gaming various NRM situations, we bring together key stakeholders of the system; we listen, we (the researchers) and they (the stakeholders from the Alaotra) both learn, and we reformulate questions. During this process new questions and surprises can emerge which were not evident from the start of the project. To sum up, we all gain a better understanding of how processes or dynamics work (this is our overarching assumption).

But let’s elaborate on the term “communication” a bit further; here we explore and present a rather new avenue of communication in research. We decided to ask a photographer to be part of the AlaReLa project, here is what he has to say…Arnaud! Your turn.

In a way locals are also researchers of their own lives. Click To Tweet

An innovative approach to dissemination of research

There is a need to be innovative in environmental sciences, involving locals and the approach described in the former paragraph explains one of the ways the AlaReLa project is doing this. However, there is also a lack of communication for all this science to actually mean something! Having been an academic myself (in various unrelated fields, do not ask on which fields, I still have some sense of decency) I do think that there is a conundrum in the way research and particularly the publication/reference/quotes system performs and sometimes clutter the way knowledge is produced. Writings by scientists for other scientists is needed, the peer review system is sound. But maybe there is a need to reach further and with more tangible effects for a more perennial outcome; so one has to find other ways to enter people’s field of view. Art could be this entrance. Or rather art could be the metaphorical foot blocking said-door. The AlaReLa team decided to continue being innovative and incorporate a photographer in the project, from start to finish, not only for pure documentation… Somebody who could invest more than a couple of weeks to go on site and maybe sleep on the floor and get bitten by bugs and almost killed a couple of times for being too noisy in shady bars. I was happy to oblige.

I decided to call this activity Ethno-photography. How does it work? The “ethno-” means a humanistic approach and long stays, with local involvement through iteration in the picture selection (and shooting) process and through potential collaboration with local photographers. We should be able to use photography as support for the project research results, or even provide more information, a different point of view, visual narration for data… That is where my (second) academic background came in handy. Let’s spill the beans: I re-educated myself in Forest Ecosystems management recently.

It is not all fun and games though… One of my biggest fear was (and still is) to depict the locals throughout the lens of Neo-Colonialism or Post-Colonialism or Neo-Post-Colonialism, et al. I am a Caucasian male of 40, born and raised in a “rich” country (France, of all places, has a, er, rich and complex history with Madagascar). Whether I like it or not, my views are tainted. By overthinking it sometimes, as well. So I had to find a way to make sure this vision I was to bring back was a vision shared with the depicted people, as real a picture as possible. Of course, paradigms, lenses, etc. Here is the way the AlaReLa team and I tried to overcome this issue. The project was separated in three distinct phases:

1. Discovery – I followed two Malagasy PhD students during their field work and, without previous knowledge (i.e., without having done my homework and read a lot about the country and its history), took a first harvest of pictures…

2. Iteration – With the first batch of pictures it is possible to identify some gaps in the stories we want to narrate and complete the set. However, the most important for me is to go back to the same spots (and more of course) and to show a selection of these pictures to the locals, asking them what is missing. For instance, let’s say I was dumb enough not to take any pictures of Zebus, there is a strong chance people will ask me something like “Dude, where are the zebus!” Zebus are an important element of local life, from social prestige to more economical reasons, which is of course linked. It is my belief that, by combining my view and theirs through this iteration, an accurate picture of the life in this socio-ecological-economical system can be achieved. I do hope that something beyond the obvious will emerge from this ping-pong with the locals. Nonetheless, we already know that I need more pictures of people working and a more varied selection of activities: fishing, cooking and farming, but also charcoal making, hunting, illegal alcohol making, etc.

3. Display / Outreach – The final outcome for the photography part of this project is a transdisciplinary exhibition, coupling photography and environmental sciences, in various locations. A first formal collaborative exhibition at a cultural institution in the capital Antananarivo with a local photographer (I am in negotiation with the French Cultural Center, the only way to have good wine at the opening…) will be organized. Then we will bring a selection of the pictures, printed on tarp, to each village where I was staying when doing, er, let’s call that field work, that sounds like science. Each time we will try to have a party and create a cultural event. Following these, the exhibition will constitute a package that will be proposed at scientific conferences as a support for the presentations of AlaReLa researchers’ work. First results were shown with a presentation and an exhibition in April (2015) at the GTOe conference in Zurich. This is aimed at bridging the gap between art and science or, to get back to our metaphor, put the shoulder in the door-frame previously blocked by the metaphorical foot.

The photography in itself has also been thought/designed to be multidisciplinary (within reason and within photography techniques) and serves different purposes. Digital colour photography is used to document the work of the AlaReLa researchers; it can be used rather quickly for Internet visibility (even during the stay, as shown on my flickr Madagascar set) and later by the researchers for their publications, reports, etc, all using creative-commons licensing. For the “art” part I use mostly black and white analogue film photography. It is beyond the scope of this article to debate of the pros and cons of film photography or to inflame any church wars, though let me just say this is a personal choice and modus operandi, not any kind of statement. The selection of which type of camera(s) to use and why is also beyond the scope of this article but to satisfy the photography-freaks amongst the readers here is my setup: I used two Voigtlander Bessas (R3M and R4A) with 3 lenses: 21mm, 35mm and 50mm, shooting Ilford HP5 and FP4 film, depending on the wind direction and my moods. The use of rangefinders helped me to get quickly close to people and be rather unobtrusive, but this set-up is limited for portraiture or details such as hands, etc. I will undoubtedly change this for the second phase. In addition to that I carried around with me a Fuji Instax camera and gave away about 70 to 80 portraits. This helped me connect with people and led to a lot of memorable encounters. Moreover it left behind a trace of my passage (each instant picture I labeled “AlaReLa project 2014”) and a tacit promise of return.

That is all good but what is the gain for the locals? Obviously they get the opportunity and the ability to bring their own point of view through the process and through the collaboration with local photographers during the final exhibitions. We’ll see how that goes. In a way locals are also researchers of their own lives. In addition, as the stays are long there are possibilities for me to share some of what I do: photography, self-publication, association creation, etc. During the first phase I gave a workshop on how to run a small photography association (BOP – the infamous “Bricolages Ondulatoires & Particulaires” collective) and try to publish artifacts to a group of photographers from Antananarivo.

This is of course still a work in progress. My second stay is planned for the end of 2015 and the AlaReLa team and I already have some ideas to go beyond what was done in phase one. However, the results from phase one are very encouraging and some of the objectives have already been reached.