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Rainbow Warrior
Despite his image as a guru of New Age music, Kitaro knows
how to ruffle a few feathers.
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| Kitaro is sampling the
temple bells of Shikoku as part of a multi-year project |
As Kitaro sits down for an interview on a hot spring day,
the contrast between the cool of Columbia Records’ cloistered
Akasaka offices and the outside heat foreshadows the surprising
contrasts that are to emerge in an hour-long chat with the
self-taught musician.
While the interview has been scheduled to promote Kitaro’s
current project sampling the temple bells of Shikoku, a wide-ranging
discussion reveals an unexpectedly stubborn side to the soft-spoken
composer.
Since his debut solo album, 1978’s Astral Voyage, created
a sensation, Kitaro has been known for atmospheric, instrumental
music that blends the sounds of East and West.
But the determination that has made him a leader of so-called
“New Age” music has also led him into minor confrontations
with authoritarian regimes at a time when he acted as a sort
of musical ambassador for Japan with neighboring countries
that had been its victims in World War II. A concert scheduled
for Singapore in the early ’80s, for example, had to
be cancelled when Kitaro refused to bend to the strict rules
applied to those seeking to enter the country.
“The tickets were sold out,” he recalls. “But
when I went through immigration, they were like, Kitaro, please
come over here, you have a problem. You cannot enter with
long hair. They said, ‘If you would like to enter Singapore
you will have to cut your hair.’ I said, ‘I don’t
want to cut my hair, so I would like to cancel the concert.’”
Kitaro’s entire band and crew had already entered the
country, but he was not to be deterred. “I called the
airline and said, ‘Please tell them I would like to cancel
the concert because I don’t want to cut my hair.’
I next flew from Singapore to Narita, and then immediately
to Hong Kong, where I held a press conference explaining why
I canceled the show.”
When he returned a decade later, Kitaro says, things were
different. “Ten years later I had another concert planned
there. Immigration officers again surrounded me, so I thought
there might be a problem, but all they wanted was to get my
autograph. Singapore had changed its laws.”
A few years later, Kitaro again ruffled feathers during one
of the first visits by a Japanese musician to China in the
postwar era. “It was 1984, and the former leader of China,
Jiang Zemin, was then the mayor of Shanghai. I think this
was normal for China, but when the leaders sit down, the music
has to start. Jiang had already sat down, but people were
still waiting to get in, so I said we should hold off another
20 minutes. Jiang’s secretaries rushed back stage saying,
‘Quick, quick, start now,’ but I insisted on waiting.
It was very strange.”
With the simple but lofty goal of creating “music that
eases the war within,” Kitaro’s new project reflects
a long record of activism for anti-war and environmental causes.
An album series intended to run to eight or nine volumes,
Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai traces beloved Buddhist monk Ku-Kai’s
thousand-year-old pilgrimage to Shikoku’s 88 temples,
whose bells Kitaro is sampling in a multi-year project. The
first volume, released last fall by Domo and distributed in
Japan by Columbia, features characteristically ethereal compositions
built around the plangent sounds of the bells.
According to the stocky 51-year-old, the project grew directly
out of the events of September 11. “I was on a flight
to LA, but there was an emergency landing in Honolulu due
to 9/11,” the 20-year Colorado resident recalls. “During
my five-day stay as I watched the sad events unfold on TV,
I was thinking about what I could do as a musician. Finally
I thought of this project.”
“Although the world seems to be going in the opposite
direction, through music I’m trying to create peace step
by step—that’s the final destination.” Kitaro’s
faith in the power of music may seem naïve, but when
viewed in light of his upbringing in a Buddhist/Shinto agricultural
clan in rural Toyohashi Prefecture, and his experiences as
Japan’s musical emissary to its former enemies, it begins
to make sense.
In addition to the physical tests of visiting all 88 temples
on the 1,100-kilometer pilgrimage route, the project turned
out to be more of a technical challenge than Kitaro had expected.
Each bell presented its own obstacles, and in order to capture
their sound accurately, he and his recording partner employed
an arsenal of high-tech microphones and recording equipment.
“The first time we went to Shikoku it was summer. Summer
is so noisy, with young people racing their cars about, so
finally we decided to do it in winter when it’s quiet
and the air is cold, clear and resonant. But even in winter
we found it noisy, so finally we had go to the temples at
two or three in the morning, the only quiet time of day.”
Despite winning a Grammy for Best New Age Album in 2000 for
Thinking of You (one of ten nominations), Kitaro has mixed
feelings about the genre with which he’s associated.
“When I started out in music, in the early ’70s,
I believed in the words New Age,” he explains. “They
followed from a lifestyle out of which the music grew. It
was the right name for the ’70s, but after that the music
changed when many jazz artists began to play in the style.
The New Age category still exists in the Grammy Awards, but
my philosophy is, I don’t care about trends, I have my
own style.”
Kitaro will perform at a concert
on August 20-21 to celebrate the selection of mountaintop
temple complex Koya-san, founded by Ku-Kai, as a World Heritage
Site. He will then tour Asia before returning to Tokyo for
concerts on November 30 and December 1. The second volume
of Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai is to be released this fall. Info:
www.kitaro.net
credit: Domo Records
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