In the center of a large practice room at Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo sits tenor saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu, instrument at his lips, legs crossed, playing along with four other saxophonists. It looks like a scene from a music class: the graying, 55-year-old teacher instructing his younger students. The three men and one woman look like they are having fun, conversing with Shimizu about the music even as he points out some mistakes or urges them to try a different tempo or phrasing.
It is one month before the world premiere of Shimizu's arrangement of the "Goldberg Variations," Johann Sebastian Bach's aria and 30 variations of it written in 1742 for harpsichord, famously recorded by the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould in 1955. Shimizu will also have four contrabass on stage with him for the performance, part of the Triphony Hall Goldberg Variations series that began in 2006 and has so far mainly featured solo pianists.
This is not Shimizu's first time to rearrange Bach. In 1997, he recorded Bach compositions, including the "Goldberg" aria, while adding electronically treated voices with sine-wave signals from an oscillator. A year before that, he released "Cello Suites 1.2.3" under his Yasuaki Shimizu & Saxophonettes incarnation. The "band" was just Shimizu himself, a one-man act he created in 1983. By improvising Bach with his tenor saxophone, he created something hard to label as classical, jazz, or any other genre. "Cello Suites 4.5.6" followed in 1999 under the same theme and completed his recording of all six Bach Cello Suites.