{"title":"Yosuke Yamashita","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eYosuke Yamashita started on violin and didn't touch a piano until his teens. By 17 he was playing professionally. By his early twenties he was at the Kunitachi College of Music studying classical composition, meeting Terumasa Hino and Masabumi Kikuchi at a club called Gin-Paris every night to play and argue about jazz, and working out that what interested him was somewhere between McCoy Tyner's harmonic density and the uncharted territory that Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor were opening up in New York. In a Japanese jazz scene that was, by his own account, deeply conservative, that was a genuinely radical position. He formed a trio in 1969 and spent the following decade building one of the most physically committed free jazz practices in the world, with no bassist, just piano, alto saxophone and drums, the piano treated as a percussion instrument as much as a harmonic one. In 1973, when Japanese graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu asked him to perform for a short film, Yamashita played a burning piano. He was not wearing protective clothing. The first European tour came in 1974, the trio by then settled as Yamashita, alto saxophonist Akira Sakata and drummer Takeo Moriyama, and the performances at the Montreux and Berlin festivals established their reputation internationally. \"Chiasma\" (MPS, 1976), recorded live at the Heidelberger Jazztage in June 1975, is the document of that lineup closest to its end. In 1979 he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival, marking his American debut, and recorded with members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. From the late 1980s he rebuilt around a New York Trio with Cecil McBee on bass, Pheeroan akLaff on drums, and eventually Joe Lovano on saxophone. Yamashita, now in his eighties, remains active.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"yosuke-yamashita-trio-chiasma-1976-japanese-mps-vinyl-lp","title":"Yosuke Yamashita Trio - Chiasma (1976 Japanese MPS Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYosuke Yamashita Trio - \u003cem\u003eChiasma\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese MPS \/ BASF (KUX-2-P, Teichiku Records)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYamashita formed his first trio in 1969 with Takeo Moriyama on drums and Seiichi Nakamura on saxophone, and it was already an unusual proposition. There is no bass in this music, and the absence is not incidental. Without a bassist holding the centre, the piano has to work as both harmony and rhythm section while the drums operate as a second lead voice rather than a timekeeper, and the saxophone is free to sit anywhere it likes. By the time Akira Sakata replaced Nakamura, the group had developed a language that owed something to Cecil Taylor and something to the European free improvisation scene without sounding much like either. Yamashita attacks the keyboard across its entire range with a percussive relentlessness. Sakata plays with a screaming, high-register intensity. Moriyama, who studied percussion at the Tokyo University of the Arts, is one of the most physically overwhelming drummers of the era. The trio toured Europe repeatedly from 1974 onward and found audiences considerably more receptive than the ones at home, which is a familiar story for free players of any nationality and a particularly acute one for Japanese musicians working outside the country's own jazz establishment.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Heidelberg performance is structured to give each configuration room. \"Double Helix\" opens with Yamashita and Moriyama as a duo. \"Nita\" is a solo piano piece with a more impressionistic, tonal quality than anything around it. \"Chiasma\" brings the full trio in and stays there. Side B repeats the pattern: another Yamashita and Moriyama duo on \"Horse Trip,\" a Moriyama drum solo on \"Introhach,\" then the trio again for \"Hachi,\" which was one of the group's core repertoire pieces alongside \"Chiasma,\" \"Clay\" and \"Mitochondria.\" The timing matters. Moriyama left the trio in 1975, so this is a document of the group close to the end of its original run, and he moved to Nagoya two years later to lead his own bands.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the September 1976 Japanese pressing on MPS \/ BASF KUX-2-P, manufactured and distributed by Teichiku Records.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MPS","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43816008876091,"sku":null,"price":70.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/IMG_7810.jpg?v=1784465630"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/yosuke-yamashita.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}