Live at MIIT House, Osaka

Jerry Gordon just celebrated 24 years of living in Osaka where he has been active as a poet, performer and concert presenter. I met Jerry early on while living in Kobe at the monthly Big Apple improvisation workshops. We collaborated on a number of performances during my time in Japan and on subsequent visits and it's always great fun making music with him. He currently runs an experimental music/performance series, Miniatures, out of his house—a renovated meat packing facility near Chidoribashi station—and draws a dedicated and attentive audience. This was concert No. 69 in the series at MIIT House and my last performance of the tour.

It was a honour to play in this intimate space where many of my friends and performers who I admire have played and danced. With Jerry on percussion/objects and saxophone, and Mitsuaki Matsumoto—who was at the start of a tour across Japan—on his modified/prepared biwa (a Japanese lute-like instrument), we played two sets together. There is no piano at MIIT House so I made use of the various  objects/percussion, contact mics, harmonica and melodica that I brought along on this trip. Without any warm-up together and being introduced to Mitsutaki and his music for the first time, I thought we played a beautiful, cohesive couple of sets. And we had such great collective intuition when it came to endings. I just love it when that happens!
 
Between our sets, sound artist Jet Vel accompanied chef/performance artist Junko Gohan while she prepared a mysterious dish behind her shopping bag of ingredients. Jet manipulated sounds sampled from Junko’s cooking preparations to create a delicious soundscape. At the break, we all got to taste Junko’s delightful salad with mango dressing. It was so fitting for everyone to be snacking on salad, seeing as the audience gallery is essentially Jerry's kitchen.

Special thanks to Jerry for organizing such a great evening and to all those who came to listen, eat, drink, and chat.

Shin'ichi Isohata offers more thoughts and photos of the evening on his blog.