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Start 20:00
The end of the 1960s: rock, pop and soul dominate the musical landscape. It was not a good time for big band jazz. And yet two ensembles set new impulses: in 1965, the Mel Lewis/Thad Jones Orchestra was formed in New York, and in 1972, Toshiko Akiyoshi and saxophonist Lew Tabackin founded an equally visionary big band in Los Angeles. The Japanese pianist, born in 1929, uses multiple instrumentalists, a vertical voice structure and extreme registers for finely spun sound poems: »If one note changes, the whole piece changes. Sometimes it takes me half an hour to decide on a note. And then I tell the band: please cherish this note.«
Akiyoshi was the first to implement influences from the Asian cultural area. »Duke Ellington’s music reflects his roots as a Black person. And so I wanted to make a jazz in which I sublimate Japanese culture. At the same time, I’m interested in what’s happening in the world. Just as journalists report on events through texts, I want to express them through music; these are the pillars of my music production.«
For the concert in the NDR Big Band’s »Masters of Jazz« series, curator Jörg Achim Keller selected material primarily from the first, classical phase. As a young arranger, he studied Akiyoshi’s writing intensively and found the way she wrote for woodwinds particularly interesting, albeit increasingly complicated, because Toshiko Akiyoshi is obsessed with detail.
Performers
NDR Bigband
director Jörg Achim Keller
Promoter: NDR