Jason Kahn interviewed by S. Glass

Jason Kahn: The first Repeat CD [Repeat, Cut / Reset, 1997] is a transitional recording for me, going from the structural way of playing that I did with Cut to letting more the sound take over; trying less to construct the music. Maybe for Toshi, too. Thats when he started phasing out guitar. It was an interesting time; maybe it was in the air. A lot of people were getting into a new approaches - Otomo was phasing out Ground Zero at that time and starting up Filament, in which he plays no-record turntable and Sachiko plays no-input sampler. As far as I can tell the so-called onkyo scene is all about this approach.

S. Glass: Tell me about Bar Aoyama.

I was coming to Japan, Toshi was looking for places to play, and a friend of ours, guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, knew of this very small, funky bar in Shibuya with low ceilings. Maybe an audience of twenty would fit inside. It was like a bunker or a tiny squat. Not very Japanese at all. I don't know if the bartender was was half-stoned or ultra-cool or what -- his eyes were barely open. Toshi, Akiyama, Taku Sugimoto, and I did our first concert there to three people or whatever it was. They then decided to do a series of monthly concerts there with this way of playing, intense concentration on quiet sound -- improvisational meetings where Toshi and Taku and Akiyama were the constant factor with one invited guest. Taku was playing guitar, either electric or semi-hollow body electric. Akiyama had a hodge-podge of electronic devices and a tabletop guitar which he sometimes played with a bow. They invited sax players, people with tape machines, Otomo or Sachiko, always different people.
I know it sounds stupid to call it something like "sound-conscious music," because obviously music is about sound, but it's also about other things. It could be athletic or show biz or conceptual or theatrical. With these guys, it was pared down to concentrating on the essence of sound. It moved away from this pulling and tugging approach to improvisational music -- the call-and-response, power playing with huge waves of sound with saxes and drummers going crazy, then getting mellow and plinking and plonking for a while, and then going back to the huge waves again. It was getting away from physicality, from instrumentality, but it was also getting away from musicality. There was an avoidance of pushing sounds, of hurrying other musicians in one direction, of competing, of fighting... One of things that made me tire of improv was that cat fight sound. Who can blow loudest and longest...

A lot of it reminds me of Evil Knievel's shtick.

There are some good things about "ecstatic jazz" but it wears me out. I don't want to knock anyone, but I don't like listening to it. I've played a lot of it myself but it's not what I'm interested in anymore. It was a confluence of events that allowed us all to arrive at the same place at the same time. At that first concert at Bar Aoyama, it clicked, everyone was on the same track. No one wanted to take solos, there was none of this hierarchy that you have even in free jazz.

From what I understand, onkyo is a completely external term that none of the players use to label themselves.

I never heard anyone use that word when I was there. I remember when Otomo was curating a festival in Wels, Austria, there was an Onkyo Room, kind of a side-stage where solo performances took place. I don't know who named the room -- maybe it was Otomo. After this festival, the term started getting bandied about, then all of a sudden there was an onkyo scene in Tokyo. Everyone's shaking their heads, wondering where it came from. It's good for focusing us and making it easier for people to grasp what we're doing, but as far as I know, none of the purveyors of "the classic onkyo sound" came up with it. I sort of like the fact that players using nothing but laptops pisses people off -- some guy on stage with an ibook just dinking away on a keyboard. I think that's cool. It does question what performance means, what music means. It confronts people with their own expectations.

My initial reaction to performances where the only movement onstage was the musician's index finger was that it was simply bad theater.

Right, why should you have to leave your house, where you could listen to the CD? Why should you go to a concert? But what's the difference between what the guy with the ibook does and what you see sitting in the back of a big concert hall, watching a solo piano player? What do you really see there? Maybe you can detect some movement, but it's still an ant. They're both sitting in front of keyboards, yet people accept one without question but not the other. Go to a rock show, what do you see? Either the guitar player jumps around or he's planted to one spot on the stage. Why is it acceptable for Pierre Henry to set foot on stage with all his tapes, or David Tudor with a bunch of circuitry? It's not like either of them are jumping around, putting on a show.

How much of the material you played at The Luggage Store came from prerecorded sources?

I used a few prerecorded samples, but I'd say ninety percent of what I do is sampled and processed in real time. If a prerecorded sound file comes into play, it's just icing on the cake, something extra. Most of it is being recorded in the moment and processed in the moment.
At first I was interested in what people who used laptops in performance were doing, but now I don't care. I'm just interested in how it sounds. This was a big argument a while ago.