You could call Seigen Ono a connoisseur of sound. He chooses only the finest sonic ingredients and knows exactly how to obtain them. As an avant-garde jazz composer and guitarist, he might not be a household name, but check out the credits on some of the best records of the last two decades and there's a good chance you'll find him. As a much-respected sound engineer and producer, Ono has worked with everyone from Miles Davis to Puffy, the Kronos Quartet to Glay.
Chatting in rapid-fire English in his basement studio in Jingumae, this 45-year-old artist has the casual stylishness of the naturally fashionable, but this shouldn't come as a surprise. He did, after all, provide the music to Comme des Garcons' Paris shows for much of the late '80s.
Along with Comme's designer Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Yellow Magic Orchestra, Ono was a key part of that surge of creativity that propelled contemporary Japanese fashion and culture onto the world stage. His first records were released not in Japan but abroad, and his first shows were at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. Ono spent much of the '80s in New York, collaborating with downtown artists such as John Zorn and Arto Lindsay, and the '90s in Brazil. He counts influential Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso among his close friends.