Hozan Yamamoto & Chris Hinze - 去来 Kyorai (1974 CBS/Sony Vinyl LP)

Hozan Yamamoto & Chris Hinze - 去来 Kyorai | Vinyl LP - 1974 CBS/Sony (SOCO 103)

• A meeting between Japan’s greatest shakuhachi player and a Dutch jazz flautist, the first volume of CBS/Sony’s “Super Session Trilogy of Traditional Japanese Instruments and Jazz Flute” series.
• Hozan Yamamoto was later designated a Living National Treasure in 2002, a Tozan-ryu shakuhachi master who had already pushed the instrument into jazz and avant-garde territory through collaborations with Masabumi Kikuchi, Gary Peacock and Ravi Shankar.
• Original 1974 Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony, produced by Nobuaki Arai.

The structure tells you everything. Side A opens with two solo prologues: Yamamoto alone on shakuhachi, then Hinze alone on flute. Two instruments from opposite ends of the world, each given space to establish a voice before the third track, “Encounter of Shakuhachi and Flute”, brings them together for the first time. What follows is nearly five minutes of two players feeling each other out, testing where the timbres overlap and where they pull apart. “Wave 1” and “Oriental” continue the conversation, pushing further into improvised territory. Then Side B flips everything. “Classics (Sound) Contemporary” is a single unbroken twenty-minute piece, easily the most ambitious thing on the record, where both instruments stretch into extended techniques and free playing that sits somewhere between Japanese classical tradition and European free jazz.

Yamamoto was already a figure of huge stature when this was recorded. His 1970 Ginkai album with pianist Masabumi Kikuchi and bassist Gary Peacock remains one of the defining crossover records in Japanese music. Hinze, meanwhile, had won Best Soloist at Montreux in 1970 and spent the early seventies recording baroque-jazz hybrids and world music sessions for CBS. He played alto flute and Indian bamboo flute alongside standard concert flute across these sessions, matching Yamamoto’s range of colour. The trilogy continued with Keden (SOCO 104, adding koto player Tadao Sawai) and Mange (SOCO 105, with gagaku musicians). All three were released in 1974 and all three are hard to find. Kyorai, the duo record, is the most focused of the set. The title translates roughly as “coming and going”, which is about as good a description as any for what these two players are doing across the album’s forty minutes.