I'm sitting in Koen-Dori Classics, a darkened club in the basement of a church on Koen-dori, in Tokyo's Shibuya district. The audience is small, seated in a few rows facing the performers at the front. Silence, then the performance begins. Textured sounds emanate from the guitar, keyboard, laptop. Then the koto joins in, and a world of sound like nothing you've heard before is created.
The koto sounds come from Michiyo Yagi, a koto player, improviser and composer. Her music spans genres and is impossible to define. She has incredible breadth, perhaps unparalleled in the koto or even Japanese music scenes. While traditionally trained, she goes beyond the confines of her training to create music entirely her own. She is equally comfortable playing Edo Period (1603-1868) compositions as she is improvising with the giants of avant-garde free jazz from Japan, Europe and the United States or performing her own compositions. Her new CD, out next month, will feature six original compositions.
Full disclosure, I'm Yagi's student and have been training to be a koto musician since I met Yagi to interview her for the first time. As it's a traditional Japanese musical teacher-student relationship, I'm often her assistant at gigs. That means that I've been privy to the whole gamut of gigs that she frequently performs. I've seen her play everywhere from J-pop concerts to tonkatsu (deep-fried pork cutlet) restaurants to concert halls in Poland, not to mention the many underground music venues she frequents in Tokyo. And I've seen her range of musical styles and techniques.