Bill Laswell stands in the lobby outside the Shinjuku Pit Inn, where on April 27 and 28 he played to packed houses with drummer Hideo Yamaki and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu. He's just set up his bass rig and is wondering where to sit for our interview.

"Should we check this funky little place out?" he asks, smirking over his shoulder, already heading for a bar at the far end of the lobby. A reddish glow seeps through the cracks in its entrance.

Laswell has a hulking frame and looks like Che Guevara might have had he reached middle age (a characteristic enhanced by his habit of wearing a beret and fatigues in public). As he ambles across the threshold, the all-male clientele inside the narrow little bar does a double-take. Laswell coolly observes the row of TV monitors above the bar on which buff men express their ardor for one another as best they can under Japan's stiff obscenity laws.

"This cool with you? I'm cool with it," he says. "But . . . you know . . . let's just get some drinks."

And with that Laswell begins an hour of discussing everything, from his Brooklyn recording studio (which he had to abandon after it turned into a flophouse for homeless artists) to the challenges of producing hits for stars and, mostly, his love of Japan and his sadness over the state of the world since Sept. 11.

As a musician and producer Laswell is the epicenter of so much music, from so many parts of the world, that the number of recordings he has made and been involved with -- about 1,000 releases -- exceeds the size of most people's entire CD collections. Not all them are gems (Laswell is the first to admit this), but the musical connections he has formed in the past three decades, among pop stars, master musicians, thinkers and spiritual leaders, has consistently produced music that is creative, challenging and entertaining. While Laswell's discography suggests a mysterious ability to be in several places at once, it also hints at his power to unify musicians across cultures, generations and genres. Past collaborators include jazz legends Herbie Hancock and Akira Sakata, funk masters Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell, the notorious Motorhead, avant-gardist John Zorn, Indian legends Zakir Hussein and Ravi Shankar, and even the Dalai Lama.

Sipping a whiskey, Laswell remarks that his greatest musical influence as a young man was Miles Davis' electric period, roughly 1969 to 1975, which was when the master began mutating jazz with the psychedelic improvisations of Jimi Hendrix and the dirty bounce of Sly Stone's funk. While many critics and even fans dismissed this brew as an aberration, Laswell bravely passed through the darkly creative portal that Miles opened and he hasn't looked back since.

Laswell rattles the chunks of ice in his drink and points out that no record company executives wanted those albums -- that is, none except Namihiko Sasaki, who was, at that time, at CBS Records and worked hard to get them released.

"Sasaki loved Miles Davis," Laswell says warmly, "and he was the only one who would touch that music. So for like 10 years, you could only get those albums here in Japan. And those were the records that I used to always listen to."

If Sasaki gave Laswell a good impression of Japan, his fondness for the country exploded after his first visit.

"I first came to Japan in '83 and I was just pretty much devastated by how much I liked it. The people were generous and real. After '83, I came to Japan . . . I've lost track of how many times. More than 70, anyway. And I've made a lot of friends here and in some ways my best friends are here in Japan. Toshinori Kondo, Akira Sakata, [Hideo] Yamaki, [Yasuaki] Shimizu and some people outside the business."

Laswell sips his drink and says that he's in town mainly to license a couple of his record catalogs and explore the chances of organizing some big gigs in Japan in the future. He regards his two-night stint at the Pit Inn as a way to reconnect with his old friends.

"It's always fun to play here with people you know and keep it loose," he says. "It's not like coming to do a big show. It's for fun, playing on a small scale with people you like."

On his second whiskey Laswell begins ruminating on the events shaking the world since Sept. 11. "It's a different energy here," he says. "It's not being hit every day, and it doesn't have to make big decisions right now. Maybe it will, but at the moment it seems very isolated from the things that are forcing territories to make quick decisions -- decisions that kill people."

Explaining how recent "decisions" have affected him, Laswell says emotionally, "It affects how I work, because it affects traveling, it affects income and it's hurt a lot of people. That's the one thing that I have a problem with." This is no surprise given the number of Arab and Muslim musicians he has befriended and recorded with over the years.

An hour later Laswell, Yamaki and Shimizu take the stage and launch into a ferocious set of music that, like the previous night, spans heavy jazz and R&B tinged with Middle-eastern melodies and Malian textures, lent by Yamaki stepping from behind the drums to play the balaphone (a sort of African xylophone).

Tonight's show is far more focused than the previous night's and Shimizu in particular is on fire from the start. Laswell plays a thunderous bass, at times crackling with distortion and at others welling up from the depths and breaching a sonic surface like some great beast emerging from the ocean's depths. He plays chords, walking lines and bends the notes on bluesy solos. At the show's end he hoists his bass on his shoulder in front of the speaker cabinet and spanks it repeatedly, electrifying the room with a howling, whizzing feedback.

But there are moments when it's not just Laswell's dynamic range that amazes -- he emanates a quiet, subtle brilliance on another level entirely, a deep musical intuition in the way he handles both rhythm and melody simultaneously, shortening the distance between Yamaki and Shimizu, drawing the potentially fragmented music into a coherent whole. A comment he made regarding his role as a unifying force replays itself:

"[Unifying people] is what you should do in music," he had said emphatically. "You want things to work and you want to communicate and you want other people to communicate. I continuously try to interact with people, and when you do that you have to get them to interact with other people. I think that's my responsibility."