Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Haruki Murakami’

Jan 25

5 Comments

Words and music

From Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn to Josef Skvorecky’s The Bass Saxophone and beyond, many novelists have made use of jazz in their stories. Jazz musicians, in turn, sometimes take inspiration from novels and plays, as with Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder and John Dankworth’s What the Dickens. Here are two new examples, coming from different angles and at different trajectories.

Jonathan Coe hoped for a career in music before becoming a celebrated novelist, playing keyboards in various bands before What a Carve-Up! established his career as a writer in 1994. The Rotters’ Club, a winner of the Wodehouse Prize in 2001, got its name from the title of an album by Hatfield and the North, giving a clue to his interest in the progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion music of the 1970s. He has collaborated with the High Lamas, Theo Travis and Louis Philippe, and now with Italy’s brilliant Artchipel Orchestra, whose previous projects have involved tackling the music of Soft Machine and Phil Miller.

Artchipel’s members arranged and performed several of Coe’s compositions at a festival in Milan in 2021, with the writer as a guest musician. A recording of the concert appeared recently as a CD included with an issue of Italy’s Musica Jazz magazine, and it turns out to be very enjoyable. The five pieces engage the senses in a twisty-turny Canterbury Scene kind of way, full of neat bits of melodic and rhythmic invention, adroitly fleshed out by the arrangers (including Ferdinando Faraò, Artchipel’s founder and leader).

Once or twice a tricky time signature gets in the way, but the music relaxes over the course of almost an hour, giving plenty of room for fine improvisations from the tenor saxophonist Germano Zenga on “I Would If I Could (But I Can’t)”, the flautist Carlo Nicita and the trombonist Alberto Bolettieri on “Erbalunga”, and the pianist Luca Pedeferri on “Spring in My Step”. Coe’s own solos, on electric piano on “Suspended Moment” and organ on a groovy closing passage in “Looking for Cicely”, are more than creditable. Two female singers, Naima Faraò and Francesca Sabatino, add a welcome extra texture.

Ten of the 11 pieces on Two Moons, a new album by the German pianist Sebastian Gahler, are inspired by the novels and short stories of Haruki Murakami, whose work often alludes to jazz, as well as pop and classical music. The eleventh piece is “Norwegian Wood”, the song which gave its title to Murakami’s breakthrough novel in 1987 and turned the author into something of a pop star himself.

I share Gahler’s interest in Murakami (I interviewed him for the Guardian here in 2003) and I like very much what he’s done with the idea, which is to make an album that might have come out on Blue Note in the early 1960s, alongside the contemporaneous work of people like Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard. This is a timeless form of music, so even though no boundaries are being stretched, equally nothing sounds tired or dated.

Fans of the books will recognise titles like “Girl with Magical Ears”, “Aomame” and “Crow”, but there’s nothing explicit in the music itself to indicate the presence of Murakami in the minds of the composer and his fellow musicians: Denis Gäbel on tenor and soprano saxophones, Matthias Akeo Nowak on double bass, Ralf Gessler on drums and, on two tracks, the trumpeter Ryan Carniaux. Here’s the trailer: nice to see that two-inch tape rolling on a Studer machine.

* To get hold of the Artchipel/Coe CD, you’ll probably have to buy a copy of the November 2022 issue of Musica Jazz (musicajazz.it). But YouTube has extracts from the Milan concert here and here and from a subsequent concert in Turin last summer here. Sebastian Gahler’s Two Moons is on the JazzSick label.

Aug 12

8 Comments

Ornithology, Murakami-style

Bird Bossa

Supernatural visitations are a regular feature of the novels and short stories of Haruki Murakami, many of which also benefit from a well chosen musical soundtrack. He combines the two in an unusually intimate way in a new short story titled “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova”, published in the latest edition of Granta, the literary quarterly.

It begins with a student exercise in which the tale’s protagonist writes a review of an imaginary album, recorded in 1963, in which Charlie Parker — who has not, after all, died in 1955 — is accompanied by the piano of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the bass of Jimmy Garrison and the drums of Roy Haynes. The repertoire consists of well known Jobim tunes, including “Insensatez” and “Chega de Saudade”, and bossafied versions of a couple of Bird’s own classics, for which Hank Jones replaces the Brazilian at the keyboard.

The essay has been long forgotten when, after many years, its writer wanders into a small New York record store and, while browsing the racks, comes across what appears to be a bootleg version of the very album created by his own imagination. Later, while pondering on this mystery, he receives a visit from Parker himself.

Not wanting to spoil the reader’s pleasure, I’ll add only that it’s a delightful invention which reaffirms Murakami’s deep love of music — as lightly worn as ever, even when it provides the essence of the story. And the accompanying illustration, by Jon Gray, is perfect.

* Granta 148, a summer fiction special, is out now.

Jul 14

22 Comments

Murakami’s elevator music

Haruki MurakamiOne of the things I love about Haruki Murakami’s fiction is the way he uses music to enrich the narrative: all kinds of music, from Haydn to the Beach Boys via Brenda Lee and Sly Stone. But jazz is his main thing, and my favourite example is probably the appearance in South of the Border, West of the Sun of Duke Ellington’s “The Star Crossed Lovers”, the gorgeous saxophone duet for Johnny Hodges’ alto and Paul Gonsalves’ tenor from Such Sweet Thunder, Duke’s 1957 suite on Shakespearean themes.

That’s just one occasion on which the author clearly allows his choices to reflect his own excellent taste. But in his new collection of short stories, Men Without Women, there’s an amusing twist. The closing story, from which the collection takes its title, centres on a man’s relationship with a woman whose taste in music is completely at variance from the protagonist’s own, or (we presume) Murakami’s. Here’s an extract:

What I remember most about M is how she loved elevator music. Percy Faith, Mantovani, Raymond Lefèvre, Frank Chacksfield, Francis Lai, 101 Strings, Paul Mauriac, Billy Vaughn. She had a kind of predestined affection for this — according to me — harmless music. The angelic strings, the swell of luscious woodwinds, the muted brass, the harp softly stroking your heart. The charming melody that never faltered, the harmonies like candy melting in your mouth, the just-right echo effect in the recording.

I usually listened to rock or blues when I drove. Derek and the Dominos, Otis Redding, the Doors. But M would never let me play any of that. She always carried a paper bag filled with a dozen or so cassettes of elevator music, which she’d play one after the other. We’d drive around aimlessly while she’d quietly hum along to Francis Lai’s “13 Jours en France”. Her lovely, sexy lips with a light trace of lipstick. Anyway, she must have owned ten thousand tapes. And she knew all there was to know about all the innocent music in the world. If there were an Elevator Music Museum, she could have been the head curator.

It was the same when we had sex. She was always playing music in bed. I don’t know how many times I heard Percy Faith’s “A Summer Place” when we were doing it. It’s a little embarrassing to say this, but even now I get pretty aroused when I hear that tune — my breathing ragged, my face flushed. You could scour the world and I bet you’d only find one man — me — who gets horny just listening to the intro to “A Summer Place”. No — maybe her husband does, too.

The thought occurs that, on this occasion, perhaps Murakami actually likes the music for which his protagonist affects disdain. I’m quite fond of “Theme from A Summer Place” myself.

Nov 14

7 Comments

Music and Murakami

murakami-on-musicYou don’t have to be a hi-fi nut or a vinyl fetishist to enjoy a place like Spiritland, the listening club/café tucked away in the redeveloped King’s Cross buildings that also house Central St Martin’s art college. It’s the perfect place to hold something like yesterday’s event at which the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s connection to music was discussed, to tie in with the new book of his conversations with the conductor Seiji Ozawa. I imagine the jazz bar called Peter Cat which he and his wife, Yoko, ran in Tokyo before he became a full-time writer had a similar atmosphere: comfortable and chilled, with the music of Red Garland or Duke Ellington coming out of a high-end sound system.

Murakami’s love of music is well known and is frequently threaded into his stories as motif or incidental colouration, from Percy Faith’s “Go Away Little Girl” in After Dark through Wilhelm Backhaus’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Sonata No 32 in Sputnik Sweetheart and Cream’s “Crossroads” in Kafka on the Shore to Janáček’s Sinfonietta in 1Q84. He’s a collector of rare jazz LPs, and when I interviewed him for the Guardian in 2003, the final question I asked him was this: if his house caught fire, which three albums, from his library of several thousand, would he save? He thought for a minute. “I give up,” he said finally. “I couldn’t choose three. So I let it burn. Everything. I save the cat.”

Yesterday I was rather hoping to hear “Star-Crossed Lovers”, from Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder, a piece which plays a role in Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, through Spiritland’s sound system, but the house DJ, Tony Higgins, didn’t play it in the couple of hours I was there. He did play Curtis Amy, Gene Ammons, Oliver Nelson and many other good sounds, but the principal memory I left with was that of the classical pianist James Rhodes delivering a blazing attack on the British government’s attitude to music education in schools.

Just off a flight from Barcelona, where he had been performing Chopin and Beethoven, Rhodes was scheduled to discuss the topic of “deep listening and literature” with Alex Clark. Having read the book, he was impressed by the knowledge and understanding of classical music that enabled Murakami to engage in discussions with Ozawa that ranged across many musical topics, including the variations between the way orchestras of different nationalities typically interpret the same composition.

Before long, however, he had detoured into what is obviously a serious preoccupation. He spoke of how absurd it was to build another concert hall in London at a cost that would subsidise many years of music education. He described offering to subsidise such lessons for pupils at a school in Basildon, only to be told by the head teacher that if the money were made available, it would have to be spent on English and maths in order to satisfy the priorities of Ofsted, the government’s education watchdog. His tone as he told this story was pleasingly intemperate.

Clark prefaced one of her questions by saying, “If you were the Jamie Oliver of music education…” In a sane world, that is exactly what he would be.

* The photograph above shows Alex Clark and James Rhodes in conversation at Spiritland. Rhodes is the author of Instrumental, a memoir published in 2015 by Canongate, and of How to Play the Piano, published last month by Quercus. Absolutely Music by Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa is published by Vintage.