MASAHIKO TOGASHI — Togashi Masahiko Quartet ‎: We Now Create - Music For Strings, Winds And Percussion (review)

MASAHIKO TOGASHI — Togashi Masahiko Quartet ‎: We Now Create - Music For Strings, Winds And Percussion album cover Album · 1969 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Ricochet
Given my knowledge of the classic Japanese jazz scene, I am basically flunking. I picked up We Now Create believing it to be a rarity - it happens to be considered one of the first free-jazz (avant, creative music, regardless...) in the country's musical index. Otherwise, Togashi seems a regular profilic composer, with this album being one of many, if still a notable one, or an all-over-the-place collaborator, with the Quartet as a particular state. Quartet itself isn't really a designative term, since on all three such albums - this one, Speed & Space, also from 1969, and 1977's Sketch - the only constant presence is Togashi himself.

Not sure if the album, based on its title, is supposed to be a work-in-progress, with no final character whatsoever, or driven by some kind of desire to give shape to things at some point while performing. Togashi tends to overwhelm his fellow musicians and make it even more percussion-centric than expected, but here he queues, or builds up, significantly. Variations On A Theme Of "Feed-Back" features a mixture of Abercrombie-like warm, reverberating, but isolated chords and pizzicato serialism at the guitar (I do recognize Masayuki Takayanagi, having listened to somewhat noisier 80s albums of his). The "Cornpipe" Dance (with Takagi's contribution) could very well be formally spot-on, folkloric-inspired, rubato and aimlessly improvised - but it sounds annoying. Fantasy For Strings, both airy and fragmented, alludes more to modern classical. Eight years later, Sketch will be just as traditionally conceived, even with Togashi forcing his bassist to remain in ostinato throughout his long improvisations, only to get himself stuck in his own monotonies later on.

These are pretty serious and evolved free jazz compositions, yet, with only Togashi's composed solo worth listening to after some unstable strident acts, I was hardly fascinated.
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