Japanese pianist Hiromi turns the tables on a bunch of jazz standards on her aptly-titled new album Beyond Standardin the company of her Sonicbloom band. She tells Selwyn Harrisabout the process, how she manages to keep the born-to-be-wild Screaming Headless Torsos guitarist Dave ‘Fuse’ Fiuczynski on a short leash, and speaks of her debt to Oscar Peterson Brainpatrol

“These days, it’s assumed that jazz will contain a large portion of indigenous music. Jazz as world music – it’s also a music that has always been about escaping your roots; about musicians and listeners discovering a magical affinity with a musical universe that could be both culturally and geographically a very long way from home.” Musicians such as the Japanese-born Hiromi Uehara number among them. Known as Hiromi for short, she was raised in Shizuoka but set out for the US close to a decade ago with a great desire to be in “the country of jazz and entertainment.” “You know I never really tried to put anything Japanese in my music,” she tells me in a central London hotel, a few hours before the first set of a three-night stint at Ronnie Scott’s club. “It’s something I’m sure I’m putting in without even thinking. Just like bowing to the people. When I greet people I bow. Even though I’m in a country where they kiss, shake hands or hug. Not because I want to show I’m Japanese but it’s a natural habit I have; I’m sure I have something like that in my chordal harmony, how I play melody, and stuff, because I’ve been in Japan for a long time.” Although she’s partial to a bit of Japanese pop, Hiromi tells me how she’s inevitably been inspired by those who first played jazz in her native country, the most renowned being the Bud Powell-influenced pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi. “I did an opening act for her when I was 18,” she says. “She’s like a living legend and she really opened up the route for Japanese people to come to the states and do jazz music so she definitely counts a lot for all Japanese musicians.” Although Hiromi is following in the footsteps of those Japanese jazz pianists who made it all possible – among them Toshiko and Yosuke Yamashita – she has her own unique take on the tradition. The new album Beyond Standardgives a new lease of life to what is often considered a dirty word in jazz. Call it jazz-rock, for the sake of argument, but the pianist and composer has re-energised it with her own idiosyncratic ideas. With John McLaughlin’s recent return to the format and the hotly anticipated reunion of the seminal 1970s electric group Return to Forever in the UK this summer, the inner mounting flame, to use a Mahavishnu-ism, may be about to be re-ignited. There are signs of Chick Corea’s playing in Hiromi’s episodic arrangements, the switches from a shimmering and vivacious classically-influenced athleticism on the acoustic piano to spiky riffing on the monosynth. In fact, Hiromi had a chance encounter with Corea in Japan when she was 17 which later led to a series of sparring duo performances in concert with him; log on to YouTube to see the affinity between them. Hiromi released her debut CD Another Mindfor Telarc in 2003 while she was still a student. It was produced by her mentor at Berklee, bassist Richard Evans and the legendary pianist Ahmad Jamal, a patron of Hiromi while still at Berklee. The album went

gold in Japan shipping over 100,000 copies and received the Recording Industry Association of Japan’s jazz album of the year award. On her second CD, Brainin 2004, Hiromi started to write for what she calls a “three piece percussive orchestra” with fellow Berklee graduates Bratislavan drummer Martin Valihora and Geordie electric bassist Tony Grey, who have been the core element of her band ever since. But three have now become four. Hiromi has hired a secret weapon of late for her Sonicbloom band. Installed for her last two albums on Telarc, the

‘I think instrumental music can really train the brain, because you have to use your creative imagination to come up with words from the music because there are no words: what this song means, what message this person wanted to bring through this music’ - Hiromi

“weapon”, an apt choice of word, to describe the guitarist Dave ‘Fuse’ Fiuczynski, a meaty jazz-metaller primarily known for spearheading the Screaming Headless Torsos and among others impressing with his slashing axe work for Vietnamese-New York trumpeter Cuong Vu a few years ago. Hiromi manages to keep him on a leash or at least bring out a different side to his playing. “Fuse was very well-known as a jazz-rock, hard guitar player but the more I played with him I got to know how beautiful he plays and solos on jazz standards and the microtonal thing that he does is very interesting,” she says. “I was always a big fan of his even before I met him and he played on my first album as a special guest and when I played with him, I felt the right time had come and that’s how he joined up. It was great playing with a guitar player. I think that’s one of the

hardest things for a pianist because they’re both chordal instruments so I really learned when to shut up. My listening focus was trained much more. The first album we did with the quartet I really wanted to make it punchy because it was very much something new I was doing from the past trio stuff, so I asked him to use more distortion than a normal jazz record so I think it was very shocking for the people who were used to hearing me. That was what I was aiming for.” As a composer Hiromi’s interest lies in placing musicians in situations in which they transcend their habitual comfort zones. “As you get to know the musicians more and more, I want to bring the best out of the musicians,” she says. “I love the characters of the musicians and I really want to promote it in my songs: ‘this harmony should be great for this musician,’ that’s how I write when I write songs.” Besides being her most epic-sounding album to date, Beyond Standardis also full of reworkings of classic compositions from different eras, covering a wide spectrum of her influences that range from Jeff Beck through to Debussy as well as American show tunes. There’s just one original; this is a contrast to previous recordings that have contained tunes all penned by her. “I always want to find a project that is the most challenging for me and I was thinking what would be the hardest thing to do with this band that I have now,” she says. “It’s so hard to train them because they’re like monsters, they go crazy, they’re not like the musicians who can be put in a box, they’re very out-of-box musicians and I thought if I put them in a box of standards that would be so interesting.” Aside from her affiliations to post-1970s jazzmeets-rock titans from Zappa through to King Crimson, her sheer joy in performance, prowess and gusto on the piano owes as much to great stylists such as Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. On Beyond Standard she pays homage to the latter with an Oscarlike stylised solo piano medley on Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’. Hiromi explains: “I really wanted to make a tribute to Oscar Peterson because he passed away two weeks before the session and he meant a lot to me. He told me so many things. I toured with him once in Japan, I was the opening act, and I visited his house and he was always encouraging me. I saw him last time I was in Birdland in 2006 and I think that was the last time he was in New York. I hung out with him. I heard the news and I was thrown and very shocked. It was right after I wanted to do something for him, and actually the song ‘I Got Rhythm’ was a song I played for him on his piano when I visited his house. So it was like a bridge between me and Oscar so I thought it would be a good song to dedicate to him. Then I just played a version like a fast stride that I played for him. But before that I put in three minutes starting with ragtime, then swing, then modal and then to free. It’s like a bridge piece. I wanted to say that Oscar is the

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history of jazz. From the very old ragtime to the free he played everything and everyone was very inspired by him and I wanted to show my respect for him and that was how I could.” Hiromi played classical piano as a young child, studying at the Yamaha School of music before going on to perform with the Czech Philharmonic orchestra at just 14. But she says she wasn’t a classical prodigy. “I wouldn’t categorise myself as a classical prodigy because I started classical music at six, but at eight years old I was introduced to jazz and I started improvising then,” she says. “So in competitions I always improvised and didn’t do very well. My heart was always into improvising.” She went on to win a scholarship at the esteemed Berklee College in Boston, moving to the US in 1999 to study jazz composition, big band arrangement and orchestration. “I wanted to know about the instruments that I don’t play!” she says, brightly. She has gone on to apply this know-how to her concept of the band as a fourpiece orchestra. “I arranged the older songs thinking of the four instruments as an orchestra piece,” she says. “I didn’t think rhythm section plus guitar and piano; it’s contrabass, guitar, piano and the drums all as percussion instruments. I just did orchestra arrangements and have these united arrangements ideas all through the album.” Like many successful musicians, Hiromi has become a globetrotter: “I live half the time in New York, half in Tokyo,” she says before correcting herself, “it’s really 20 per cent in New York, 20 per cent in Tokyo, and 60 per cent in the rest of the world.” Something of a star in her native Japan who has achieved huge CD sales, she has regularly topped reader and critic polls and has received countless awards. But does she get recognised in the street? She says not really, even though she does a lot of music TV in Japan. She thinks it’s down to how she looks; her look in everyday life is very different to how she looks onstage; she points to her glamorous costume and with a hand gesture shows me how her hair is extended upwards in performance. In spite of this success, Hiromi says contemporary instrumental music is not really very popular in Japan and I imagine this is generally the case elsewhere. Perhaps it’s all a pipe dream going back to an era when jazzrock was moving in the hub of popular culture, but Hiromi tells me she’s aware how hard an effort it is to get people to open their mind to instrumental music. “I think instrumental music can really train the brain,” she says. “Because you have to use your creative imagination to come up with words from the music because there are no words: what this song means, what message this person wanted to bring through this music? What do I feel through this music? And you can take it as you want, as there are lots of possibilities.”

Jazzwise\\JULY 2008

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