‘Play slower…’

In his sleeve note to Masabumi Kikuchi’s album Black Orpheus, a recording of the Japanese pianist’s last solo concert, Ethan Iverson noted a piece of paper placed on the piano with the instruction: “Play slower. I sound better when I play slower.” Kikuchi took his own advice to heart. In the solo performances recorded in the 20 years before his death in 2015, aged 75, his playing decelerated to the point where the music’s metabolism seemed to enter another level of existence.

The final evidence was gathered in a session on a vintage Steinway D at New York’s Klavierhaus in 2013, its first fruit released four years ago by the Red Hook label under the title Hanamichi. Now there’s a second helping from the same source: Hanamichi, The Final Studio Recording Vol II. Like its predecessor, it mixes untitled improvised pieces with the standard tunes he loved to explore, in this case “Manha de Carnaval”, “Alone Together”, “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Ship”.

I’ve previously written about Black Opheus here and the first volume of Hanamichi here, so I’m not going to repeat myself. I’ll only say that this version of “Manha de Carnaval” is the most fully realised of the three I have by him on record (the first two from 1994 and 2012), and his interpretation of “Alone Together” so beautifully illuminates the emotional contours of the 1932 Broadway ballad by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz that it becomes a definitive instrumental exploration, to match Jo Stafford’s 1945 vocal reading.

It’s no accident that two of the standards here, “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Ship”, were recorded by Miles Davis and Gil Evans in the late ’50s. The two pieces are irradiated by the memory of Kikuchi’s friendship with Evans, who helped him move to the United States in the early ’70s, and in whose bands he played during that decade. But if they inhabit the spirit of those earlier orchestral pieces, they also distil Kikuchi’s own remarkable essence.

There’s a short trailer here, with a snatch of “Manha de Carnaval”. You’ll get the idea.

* Masabumi Kikuchi’s Hanamichi: The Final Studio Recording, Vol II is out now on Red Hook Records: https://www.redhookrecords.com/ The photograph of Kikuchi is by Abby Kikuchi and is borrowed from the booklet accompanying Black Orpheus (ECM).