By Eyal Hareuveni
Japanese pianist Masahiko Satoh (b.1941) is a titanic figure in Japan’s rich
history of jazz, free jazz, and free improvised music since the late
sixties, collaborating and recording with local heroes like percussionist
Stomu Yamashita, drummer Togashi Masahiko, pianist Aki Takase, and trumpeter
Itaru Oki, and with Joëlle Léandre, Ned Rothenberg, Peter Brötzmann, and
Paal Nilssen-Love. Greek, Brussels-based guitarist Giotis Damianidis was
born forty years after Satoh, and has established a strong bond with another
Japanese hero of free jazz and free improvised music, reed player-vocalist
Akira Sakata, with whom he recorded a duo album and with the ensemble
Entasis (Live in Europe 2022, Trost, 2023).
Thousand Leaves 千 葉 is the first collaboration of Satoh and Damianidis, and
was recorded at their first-ever, free improvised meeting at Jazz Spot Candy
in Chiba in February 2024 during Damianidis’ first visit to Japan. When
Damianidis returned for a second visit to Japan, he performed in a quartet
with Satoh, Sakata, and drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. The album’s title refers
to the oldest collection of Japanese waka poetry, the Man’yōshū, 万葉集,
literally “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”.
Satoh and Damianidis immediately found a common, inquisitive sonic language
that employs extended techniques to shape, sculpt, and color sound and erase
all generational, geographic, or genre boundaries. The opening piece, the
19-minute “First Ghost” sketches a mysterious, timeless texture where
Satoh’s always elegant and mostly lyrical playing on the acoustic piano is
contrasted by Damianidis’ effects-laden, urgent but abstract amplified
electric guitar. Slowly, Satoh introduces brief quotes of classical music
and post-bop while Damianidis settles on a distorted course, but these
gifted improvisers converse without compromising their distinct languages,
obviously, with many intense collisions. The following four pieces deepen
the strong rapport established in the first piece and allow for more playful
and rhythmic or contemplative dynamics, with a few ironic comments, and more
space that emphasizes their idiosyncratic, uncompromising voices. The last
piece, “Filigree”, suggests an imaginative, free-associative, and intense
abstraction of a twisted but passionate Greek dance.
A masterful performance of the art of the moment.