Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Insights

by Fritz Byers

In the summer of 1978, the critics polled by DownBeat could not settle on a single jazz album of the year – at the time, perhaps the premier honor in jazz. So they bestowed it on five: Ornette Coleman’s Dancing in Your Head; two by Dexter Gordon, Homecoming and Sophisticated Giant, the records that marked his return from expatriation in Copenhagen; Roscoe Mitchell’s Nonaah. And Insights, by a sixteen-piece orchestra based in Los Angeles, led by Toshiko Akiyoshi, a pianist and composer born in Manchuria, raised in Japan, and trained at Berklee School of Music in Boston – the first Japanese student the school had ever enrolled.

The list is a snapshot of music pulling in four directions at once: harmolodics (Ornette); the bebop master coming home at last (Dexter); a pioneering member of the avant-garde consortium, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Roscoe); and a big band whose leader had begun writing orchestral music that sounded like no one else’s.

As far as I can determine, this marks the first time a woman received the award.  The album is credited to the Toshiko Akiyoshi–Lew Tabackin Big Band, and Lew’s tenor and flute are central to the band’s sound. But every note of Insights was composed and arranged by Toshiko.

In the third session of this fall’s Women in Jazz class, devoted to women’s movement from the margins of the music toward its core as composers, arrangers, bandleaders, and lead instrumentalists, we began with Toshiko and her compositions, with their vivid tonal textures – she compared big-band writing to “painting with colors,” which she contrasted with the black and white brushstrokes of solo piano.

This week on Jazz Spectrum Friday, we feature Insights. This gives me the chance to say something about three gifts that, in Toshiko, are really one: the composer, the orchestrator, and the pianist.

THE COMPOSER

Toshiko has been affectingly candid about the moment her writing found its direction. In 1999, she told an interviewer that, when Duke Ellington passed in 1974, she read a memorial tribute in which the critic Nat Hentoff discussed how proud Duke had been of his race, and how much of his music was a reflection of it. She said this caused her to wonder about her own heritage, to look more deeply into it as a source of inspiration and as a way of broadening the textures and timbres of her writing. (The entire interview is worth your time; you can find it here.)

Insights is where that idea gains full force.

Side one offers three pieces – “Studio J,” “Transience,” and “Sumie.”  (On “Sumie,” the kakko, a small Japanese drum, enters the band.)

Side two is given over entirely to “Minamata,” a suite in three movements: “Peaceful Village,” “Prosperity & Consequence,” and “Epilogue.” The title names the fishing town on Kyushu poisoned in the 1950s and 60s by methylmercury that a chemical plant discharged into its bay, and the movement titles trace the arc Toshiko intended, from a settled village through industrial prosperity to its crushing cost to the community and its sense of peace. Toshiko’s titles tell us what the music is about, and the story is a somber one.

The orchestrations of “Minamata” are an exercise in contrast, fusing jazz and traditional Japanese theater. The suite is a cinematic tone poem, blending traditional Japanese instruments and theatrical Noh vocal style into a big-band jazz masterwork.

Toshiko brings in Hisao Kanze, a master of traditional Noh theater.  He performs traditional Noh chanting in a stylized and deeply resonant voice against the jazz backdrop. I hear in his vocals the harrowing human suffering and grief of the tragedy that I believe rest at the core of the composition, He acts as a sort of ghostly narrator, channeling what comes through to me as a sense of mourning and ancestral outrage that a standard horn section, even one arranged by Toshiko, could not replicate.

And the suite relies on classical Noh rhythmic conventions, featuring guest artists Tadao Kamei on the ōtsuzumi (a larger drum, held at the hip) and Hayao Uzawa on the kotsuzumi (a smaller drum, typically rested on the right shoulder). These instruments are defined by sharp, striking slaps paired with vocalized drum calls. In the middle piece of the suite, detailing, if we take the title at its word, the perils of prosperity, you can sense the tension between industrial greed and human grief as it is driven forward by these drums. Their sparse, irregular punctuation disrupts the comfortable, steady pulse of Western big-band drumming, injecting suspense and a foreboding wisp of doom.  

THE ORCHESTRATOR

Billy Strayhorn observed that Duke Ellington played piano, but his real instrument was the band. The same is true of Toshiko. She wrote precisely for specific players – above all for Lew, whose flute and tenor are the band’s two signature voices – and the textures she drew from her woodwind section, with saxophonists doubling on the flutes and clarinets, gave the orchestra a sound you can identify within a few bars of any of her large-scale pieces. Insights has so many rapturous signature moments of this kind that to choose one would be churlish.  

In class this week we listened to the original orchestral version of Toshiko’s piece “Long Yellow Road,” which is the title track of a 1975 album, and I swear I heard gasps from several corners of the room, elicited by the reed-section counterpoints, somehow both lush and bracing, against which Lew was soloing.

THE PIANIST

For all that, Toshiko began as a pianist, and a formidable one, a bebopper in the Bud Powell mold whom Oscar Peterson heard in Tokyo in the early 1950s and urged Norman Granz to record.  

Then the orchestra, and writing for it, took over for decades. In 2003, she disbanded it. Her reason was simple: she missed the piano, and she wanted to concentrate on playing it – and, at 74, to get better.

The pianist had never really gone anywhere, of course. The 10 p.m. hour Friday concludes with two recordings that demonstrate the point, both made while the orchestra was still in business: “Long Yellow Road” again, this time by a trio, with Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums, at the Blue Note Tokyo in 1997; and the standard “Old Devil Moon,” from her solo recital at Maybeck, Volume 36 of Concord’s celebrated series.

I would think that most of us, having led one of the great orchestras of our time for thirty years, would consider the question of our piano playing pretty well settled. At 74, Toshiko decided it wasn’t. You can judge for yourself.  

She’ll turn 97 in six weeks. I’m imagining her at this moment, working on an étude. And perhaps imagining one more canvas for the Orchestra.