Archive for March 2004
Hanko
Miyachi-sensei has just returned from China, where he supervised a group of students visiting a university for a week or two.
Emptying my mailbox today, I found a little green cloth-covered box which held a signature seal carved from a piece of stone. The accompanying note from Miyachi-sensei said that it shows my name.
sugoi!
If anyone can read the characters, please tell me what they say! Here's what the seal looks like. And just because I couldn't resist: I had to try it out on a drawing.
La Grande Temperance
The central square of the Mie Center for the Arts is dominated by La Grande Temperance, a colourful piece by the French-American sculptor, painter and designer Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 -- 2002). The other day, I went to the square and took a couple of photos; here's a gallery. What follows is a few remarks on the sculpture, all dutifully hyperlinked.
La Grande Temperance is a Nana, a large-breasted, wide-hipped, ample-bodied woman that looks like a prehistoric fertility goddess ironically dressed in a colourful bathing suit. Niki de Saint Phalle exhibited the first series of Nanas in 1965 at a gallery in Paris. These sculptures were followed the next year by Hon, a monumental Nana shown at Stockholm's Moderna Museet. Museum-goers were invited to enter the sculpture through her genitals, which caused a bit of a scandal because it violated decorum. Ever since, the Nana has been the artist's signature creation.
The sculpture at the Center for the Arts is a replica, a remake of the original Temperance located in the Tarot Garden near the town of Capalbio, close to the coast in the south of the Italian province of Tuscany. This garden is home to a series of twenty-two large sculptures and embodies the most ambitious project undertaken by Niki de Saint Phalle; its construction had been under way for some twenty years -- during which the artist lived in the sphinx-like Empress, which holds a cavern equipped with kitchen, bedroom and bathroom -- before it opened to the public on May 15, 1998.
While the garden is inspired by Antoni Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona, the sculptures themselves represent the twenty-two main Tarot cards, known as the "major arcana." The Tarot is a deck of seventy-eight playing cards which originated in Italy in the 15th century. Each of the cards shows a different image, most of them depicting a single human or superhuman figure, some of them allegorical (such as Death, or, indeed, Temperance). Whereas Tarot cards were and still are used for playing, many and contradicting theories are being offered on their mystic significance. Some of these theories underpin the practice of using the Tarot for fortune telling.
The Tarocchi of Mantegna (c.1465) are one of the first Tarot decks. They show Temperance with two vases. Pamela Coleman Smith's deck first appeared in 1909 and shows Temperance with wings and two cups. The wings and the vases, therefore, are traditional attributes of Temperance.
"Temperance" means "moderation" or "self-restraint". Today's meaning of "total abstinence from alcoholic beverages" is hardly intended in the earlier allegorical images, but the two vases at least hint in this direction: assuming that Temperance pours water into wine, she makes the beverage less intoxicating. In de Saint Phalle's treatment, of course, the liquid is red, so the figure seems to be pouring wine into water, which either makes her a contradiction in terms, Extreme Temperance, or invites us to look for other possible meanings.
There is at least one other version of de Saint Phalle's Temperance at the Mingei Museum in San Diego, California, an institution which dedicated an exhibition to the artist in 1999.
There may be others, but the one version of Temperance I'm familiar with is located at Zürich Main Station in Switzerland. The station, a palace-like structure typical of its period, was built in 1871. Today, the trains no longer enter its great hall because there are too many tracks to fit inside. Long-distance trains now stop in an extension to the original building while regional trains stop in the warren-like maze underground. The old hall now houses a meeting point, pedestrian access to the tracks and the shopping malls below street level, and a great deal of empty space that is put to various uses. On November 14, 1997, in celebration of CFS Swiss Railroad's 150th anniversary, Niki de Saint Phalle's sculpture "Guardian Angel" was unveiled: a big Temperance suspended from the great hall's ceiling.
Poking around the Web with Google's handy Image Search, I have found a few photos of the Guardian Angel: here, here, here, and here. In addition, this Japanese page includes an image of the Main Station and of the Christmas Market with Guardian Angel.
How did the Zürich Temperance come to be renamed Guardian Angel? Zürich is a protestant city -- in fact it was one of the centres of the Reformation back in the 16th century -- and protestants traditionally oppose the catholic teaching of guardian angels, the idea that every human being has an individual heavenly protector that keeps him or her out of harm's way. But with the arrival of the New Age movement in the last few decades, angels have become part of popular culture again. Maybe guardian angels more acceptable to the general population than anything that has to do with the Tarot, which is usually associated with esoteric teachings frowned upon by mainstream Christians of either denomination.
However, the most important reason for the name change is likely to be something else altogether. The sculpture was sponsored -- an exact sum was never disclosed -- by Switzerland's largest security firm, whose uniformed officers patrol the station, or used to, anyway, back at the time. As I recall, the firm ran a national ad campaign with the word "Protection" boldly printed across billboards. One of the ads in the series featured de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel in the background, establishing a fairly obvious connection between the firm's services and the sculpture's new name.
No name change was required here in Mie-ken: a plaque on the plinth reads, in French, "La Grande Temperance". The connection that the sculpture establishes with its surrounding at the Center for the Arts has probably doesn't relate to any specific meaning the sculpture itself may have and reflects the artist's reputation instead. Niki de Saint Phalle is popular with feminists because her Nanas project a positive, powerful image of women, and possibly because their voluminous bodies run counter to the ideal of extreme slenderness celebrated by the fashion industry -- an ideal which, many feminists claim, undercuts the self-esteem of most women, who do not conform to it. La Grande Temperance stands right in front of the entrance to the Mie Prefecture Gender Equality Center, an institution, if their name is anything to go by, which fights for women to have more power in this prefecture.
The Niki Museum in Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, opened in October 1994.
An American in Tokyo
Chris Juergensen is a highly experienced studio musician and session guitarist from New York. He has toured widely, and after teaching for six years at the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, he moved to Japan to become the Director of Education at the Tokyo School of Music.
His debut CD as a solo artist, Prospects, came out in 2002: it has been warmly received throughout the world and can be listened to in full on the Internet.
Chris is married to Michi and became a dad on February 21, 2004. He kindly agreed to be interviewed on Tawawa.
First off -- congratulations on your daddyhood! As far as a musician is ever going to be settled, are you settled in Japan?
Now? Hmm ... I'm as settled as I have ever been, I guess. It's funny, because I've only been in Tokyo a little over a year but the birth of my daughter has calmed me down a little. In my thirteen years in Japan I lived five years in Osaka, six in Fukuoka, one in Nagoya and, as I mentioned, a little over a year here in Tokyo. So, even though I've been here for a long time, I'm still a rolling stone!
How do you like it here?
I Like Japan, and my life here has given me the chance to understand my own country better. Growing up in one country can make you culturally near-sighted. Japanese culture has really given me something to compare American culture with. And I'm proud to say that in spite of the war, which I don't particularly agree with, I've become a true patriot. There are some things that I had never thought about before coming to Japan that embarrass me about American culture, like the "Finders Keepers" mentality, but I have learned to appreciate the American creative and venture spirit. Japan has allowed me to closely examine the lens through which I view myself and my country, America.
Other than that, my job here in Japan has given me the unique chance to learn about management, education and marketing and at the same time gives me unlimited access to state-of-the-art recording studios. My situation allows me to pursue my musical career and still get a paycheck and hands-on management experience from the music school that I manage.
What's the difference between playing an American audience and playing a Japanese audience?
Japanese audiences crack me up sometimes. American audiences clap and go nuts when they feel like it, there is no need for a consensus. Japanese audiences, especially younger ones, sometimes seem to not understand audience etiquette; when to clap and that kind of thing. They sometimes tend to wait for someone to clap so they can, too. If everybody is waiting for somebody else to clap before they do, it takes a little time to get a reaction from your audience.
Japanese people do seem to appreciate music and are more willing to pay for it than Americans.
You taught the guitar for a number of years in Los Angeles, now you're teaching in Tokyo. Again, are there any striking differences you noticed? Are Japanese students different? Did you have to adapt your teaching style in any way?
Teaching in Japan has been a great learning experience for me. Japanese culture demands that everyone goes to some kind of school directly after high school, whether you know what you want to do or not. A typical student at a school like MI in the states, where I taught guitar years ago, would have five to ten years experience playing and would more likely than not be in his twenties. 90 percent of the kids at Tokyo School of Music, where I currently teach, are eighteen and have about three years experience on the guitar. Because of this, it is very easy to discourage a Japanese student. If you make him feel like he is in over his head, he'll head for the exit.
In America, and I was guilty of this myself, we tend to focus on the gifted students. The unmotivated student gets left behind. Teaching in Japan is just as much about motivation as it is about reading charts and playing chords and scales.
This has been a very rewarding thing for me because the underdogs are the ones that thank you at graduation, that make you glad you decided to become a teacher. The gifted, motivated students will go on to better things with or without my help. Teaching in Japan has made me understand the true meaning of the word "teacher." The first thing I do when I teach my first class of the year is make all the students in the room reverse their seats, the ones in the back come to the front and the ones sitting in front move to the back. This gives me a chance to be closer to the kids that really need my help the most.
You call Toshi Hiketa your "little brother." Did you develop close relationships with Japanese musicians in Los Angeles before coming to Japan? More broadly: I notice that LA continues to be major destination for Japanese musicians. Any comment on that?
I didn't meet Toshi Hiketa in LA, he was a student of mine in Japan. He has now gone on to become one of the guitarists in The David Lee Roth Band. Quite an accomplishment when you think about it: He's following in the footsteps of Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai.
I had a very touching experience recently with him. I went to LA as a demonstrator at the NAMM show (an equipment convention) recently. I called him ahead of time to tell him, so we could get together for dinner. When I got to town he got me in the studio to record a track on his newest record with his own band, The Hideous Sun Demons. He told me that he wanted to record the track together with me because of our long history together and because I was like a brother to him. It moved me because I would never ask another guitarist to play on one of my CDs. I'm way too self-absorbed and my ego is way to big!
There are plenty of Japanese musicians living in LA now but none have done as good as he has. Not that his success is my doing, but I'm still proud of him.
LA and NYC will always draw Japanese artists. After all, the music that is popular in Japan has almost nothing to do with Japanese music, it is an American product and immersion in the culture is a must.
Are there any Japanese musicians you'd either cite as personal inspirations or that you'd see as innovators/original contributors to international contemporary music?
Sure there are some great artists here in Japan that are playing important roles in today's music scene. Akiko Yano and her ex, Ryuichi Sakamoto are both geniuses. I wish I could remember her name but there is a young woman who does amazing things with the Japanese koto. I saw her on TV and she knocked me out.
You describe yourself as a fusion guitarist. What does "fusion" mean to you?
"Fusion" simply means a combination of different musical elements. I take the usual approach: Jazz harmony and Rock rhythm or Jazz rhythm combined with a Rock tone and attitude.
Anything can be categorized as Fusion these days. I have a contract with a very unique record label, Magnatune.com. There is some really interesting fusion going on over there. Shiva in Exile melds Middle Eastern harmony with Rock grooves, Beth Quist's music combines Western elements with Indian. "World Fusion" might be a good term to describe this genre. There are some very interesting things going on.
Fusion in the generally accepted sense has been around for more than thirty years. In terms of what is taught at music schools, has it become "mainstream" like swing and bebop?
It has become fashionable to play Fusion, but as it is a combination of different musical elements, it takes a lot of work to get it together. To do it right, you have to study not only Jazz, but Rock, Blues, Funk and Latin music also. There are still a lot of music schools, especially the Universities, that refuse to teach anyone Rock and Blues or anything other than Jazz or Classical, so by the same standards Fusion is a non-entity at these institutions. Of course, schools like MI, LAMA or Berklee accept Fusion as a unique genre and encourage the exploration of it. It's funny though, when I was teaching at MI I got sick of hearing funk versions of "Giant Steps."
In the notes to the blues tune "Extraordinaire" on the Prospects album you mention your late friend Don Coen, who made you pick up the guitar when you were twelve and taught you the blues. Your next album, Big Bad Sun, is going to be dedicated to the blues entirely. I've just listened to the live video clips on your site. What strikes me is the contrast to Prospects: while the album has a laid-back, highly controlled, sophisticated, subdued, lyrical feel to it, you're letting it all hang out on stage. Are there two Chris Juergensens -- one jazz, one blues -- or is this a case of going back to your roots?
Great question! I have struggled with my split personality my whole career. In the beginning, the Fusion Chris Juergensen and the Blues Chris Juergensen where two distinctly different people; if they ever met and touched in this world, the universe would annihilate itself in some kind of cosmic matter/anti-matter explosion.
As I got older, the two of us have become great friends and work comfortably together now. It's true, the Prospects CD kind of ignores the Blues Chris Juergensen and the upcoming Big Bad Sun CD locked the door on the Fusion Chris. But the next CD that I record, Strange Phenomenon, embraces all my musical loves, Blues, Rock, Jazz, and Funk.
Tell me about the Internet as a distribution channel for independent artists. There are publishers out there who sign artists and distribute their work online, such as BuyMusic.com, eMusic.com, CDbaby.com, Magnatune.com and others. Magnatune's tag line reads, "we are not evil" -- the implication being that the big American music labels are just that: evil. From a musician's perspective, can you remind us of how exactly the major labels came by their bad reputation among recording artists?
I'll take the middle road on this question. It's true, very few musicians walk away from the music business with anything. And a lot walk away with a lot of problems, financial, mental and physical.
But it is important to remember that most musicians screw themselves. You see, the record label is taking all the risks, they pay for everything and want to make their money back on the deal. Musicians are taking no risks when they sign a contract.
What usually happens is this: artists take an advance on every CD they release and start spending it immediately. Rather than putting the money somewhere safe or investing it, they go right to the Ferarri dealership, get a new car and on the way home, drive through Beverly Hills looking for a new pad.
Just like any advance in any other industry, it is an advance, meaning it isn't your money 'till the person paying the advance makes at least that much. It is foolish to believe that you can make a profit on every CD that you release, so sooner or later you are going to get a bigger advance than the record label makes on the CD in question and if you can't pay back the money that they gave you, you are going to find yourself in big financial trouble.
The music industry has covered all bases to make sure that they don't get themselves in any financial troubles, they have hedged all bets. Musicians need to study their contracts and learn how to be financially responsible. Most of the musicians that I personally know could have prevented the whole catastrophe by simply acting responsibly and keeping their living standards at similar levels as before their big debut.
It's true, the labels have gone overboard, royalties are pathetic and they want publishing rights these days too. Rather than taking an advance, it would seem to make more sense to ask for better royalties and keep your publishing rights. These days, because of the Internet, artists have way more power and that is why the music industry is smelling their own doom. You don't have to sign a contract with anyone to release a CD and make money on it. Artists have something now that they never had before: choices.
Independent distribution seems to be working for you. Are online distributors a viable alternative?
My music can be found on all the download sites you mentioned. But the only one that really sells my music is Magnatune. You can download everything on eMusic.com or BuyMusic.com and the other sites, everything from Michael Jackson to, well... me.
These sites, other than Magnatune, seem to be for the most part extentions of the big labels. For that same reason you don't get too many people searching for the unknown fusion guitarist Chris Juergensen on sites like those. They are mostly looking for a song that was popular when they where in high school or the song that was playing when they made out in the car at the drive-in or something.
Magnatune picks their artists carefully and for that reason the site is very focused. Magnatune signs about two artists for every hundred submissions that they get.
This is what happens when you go to Magnatune: you look through their artists and you find someone like yours truly in the Jazz category. You click on my name and my page comes up. You can listen to my whole CD free of charge as many times as you want. If you want to download the music, you have to pay for it.
This is where it gets really interesting. You get to pick the price of my CD! Five dollars to eighteen. Now, I first figured everyone would download my CD for five bucks, but I was wrong. The average price is about nine dollars. People want to support independent musicians like myself so they pay more. Let's face it, if you had the choice to pay five or eighteen dollars for a Michael Jackson CD, would you pay eighteen? Neither would I; Sony and Michael have enough cash, but I don't! Magnatune splits the money in half with me, which is the best deal you can get. A major label would pay me 6% -- yes, someone else gets the other 94%! What a concept!
In my opinion, do-it-yourself is the best way to go these days. Distribution is simple because of the Internet. Record your CD, send it to CDbaby.com, and they will sell it for you. I also sell CDs from guitar9.com which specializes, as you can imagine from the name, in instrumental guitar CDs. You can sell your work yourself from your own site also, as I do, and there are plenty of download sites. If you sell a few thousand CDs as an independent artist, the labels will be more willing to talk to you and offer better contracts. The best part about the do-it-yourself, independent route is that you are in control and you will make way more money per CD.
Times are getting interesting to say the least.
Omizutori
I went to see a festival called Omizutori held at Nigatsudo next to Todaiji temple in Nara. As part of the rite, some monks come running along, bringing a stick with a burning cedar ball. People believe that if you catch a falling spark, you can spend the year without any illness or accidents.
I don't know what this festival's origin is but it is said that after it spring comes to Nara.