Seikatsu Kjy Iinkai Seikatsu Kjy Iinkai

Description

Ferocious JP / US free jazz bomb. A rare meeting between the NYC free jazz scene and the Japanese free music scene. Old-style Gatefold LP, with rare photographs & liner notes by Alan Cummings.

Following hot on the heels of the first, mid-sixties generation of Japanese free jazz players likeKaoru Abe, Masayuki Takayanagi, Ysuke Yamashita, Motoharu Yoshizawa, etc., an exciting second wave of younger players began to emerge in the seventies. Two of its leading members were the saxophonistKazutoki Umezuand multi-instrumentalistYoriyuki Harada. Both were post-war babies and immigrants to the city, Umezu from Sendai in the north and Harada from Shimane in the west. They first met as students in the clarinet department at the Kunitachi College of Music, a well-known conservatory in western Tokyo. Harada was already securing sideman gigs on bass with professional jazz groups and was active in student politics, making good use of his connections to set up jazz concerts on campus. It was around this time that the two began to play together in an improvised duo, with Umezu on clarinet and bass clarinet and Harada on piano. They also experimented with graphic scores and prepared piano.

These experiments eventually led to the creation of a trio, with a high-school student calledTetsuya Morimuraon drums, that they decided to nameSeikatsu KjyIinkai (Lifestyle Improvement Committee) in joking reference to the Marxist discourse of the student radicals of the time. Around 1973, Umezu and Harada decided to call it a day and go their separate ways. Umezu began playing with theToshinori Kondo Unitand Harada with theTadashi Yoshida Quintet. In 1974 Harada formed his own trio and began to play at jazz coffeehouses across Japan.

Then, in September 1974 Umezu travelled alone to New York, where he set about building connections with the loft jazz scene in the city. It was a fortuitous moment to arrive in New York. Rents were cheap in the Lower East Side, possibilities for squatting existed, so many musicians and artists had moved to the area. Umezu soon became known on the scene asKappoand he started to make connections with some of the young musicians likeDavid Murray, Arthur Blythe, andOliver Lake. He recalls making the rounds of the lofts every evening, checking out the performances, and getting the chance to sit in with many groups includingJuma SultansAboriginal Music Societyand trumpeterTed Daniels orchestra.

Things were going so well that Umezu wrote to Harada and invited him to come to New York. He accepted and arrived in the city in July 1975. Harada and Umezu took the opportunity to resume their artistic collaboration. Their first concert together in over two years took place on July 20th at another loft, Sunrise Studios at 122 2nd Avenue. Umezu remembers Sunrise as an unusually sunny loft with the rarest of things, a grand piano. He invited alongAhmed Abdullah,a trumpeter he had got to know while playing with Ted Daniel. Abdullah led his own group and was a long-termSun Rasideman. William Parker, one of the key figures in the loft jazz scene of the period, was on bass. Abdullah also brought alongRashid Sinanon drums. Sinan drummed in Abdullahs units throughout the seventies, but he had also played onFrank Lowes immortalBlack Beingsalbum and collaborated withArthur Doyle, playing on DoylesAlabama Feelingalbum. By all accounts the evening was a huge success, with speed and dynamism of Haradas piano playing gaining him lots of support.

Since they had managed to save some money from their day jobs, Umezu and Harada decided to set up a recording session with the same line-up on August 11 at Studio We, where there was a well-equipped studio on the third floor. Umezu recalls the session as follows: ‘Of course, we recorded our performances in one take, with zero retakes as far as I remember. On all the tracks we recorded, we moved as one unit, sharp and fast. That was the nature of Lifestyle Improvement Committee, New York Branch.’