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Bill Evans: Time Remembered

Director Bruce Spiegel mines the archives to present a tender portrait of the jazz great.


Make no mistake, this is a tragedy. Bill Evans: Time Remembered (2015) recounts the life of the inimitable jazz piano great, tracing his rise to professional acclaim and his deep personal and professional relationships to their devastating conclusion, bleeding out in a car on the way to hospital. Why this is a tragedy, Spiegel lets you decide for yourself. 

Marshaling a trove of archival footage and exclusive interviews with Evans’s friends, family and colleagues, the documentary is a collective attempt at divining the man behind the music, the soft-spoken pianist from New Jersey. From the very beginning, Spiegel, speaking through the interview of bassist Chuck Israels, gives us the answer he arrived at after eight painstaking years, “Damn if I know, really. But all the information that’s really important, it’s in the music.” 

Time Remembered is first and foremost a paean to Evans’s music. His all-star cast of interviewees, compromising luminaries like vocalist Tony Bennett and the recently deceased drummer Paul Motian, are most effusive when they discuss Evans’s work. Their praise may not be novel- many critics have extolled Evans’s expressive touch and command of harmony – but this profusion of jazz notables consistently lauding Evans’s deep connection to his music drives the point home. In the words of Marty Morell, Evans’s longest serving drummer, “He’s just so connected to his heart.” We associate genius with surpassing the common man, but Evans’s power lay in his unflinching portraiture of his humanity. You don’t need to understand bebop enclosure or modal jazz to be moved. 

Spiegel lets the music speak for itself. He intersperses discussions of Evans’s work in the context of the 1960s jazz scene with snippets of his recordings. For a full minute, Spiegel makes you sit with “Peace Piece” (1958), a delicate meditation, cradled by the same three chords on the bass clef as the melody winds its way from serenity to bittersweet longing, before it is soothed into resolution. Friend and poet Bill Zavatsky closes the segment, declaring “Bill spoke to me in a way I hadn’t heard anyone talking.” 

And Evans spoke chiefly through his music. Referring to the famous photographs of him bent in concentration over the keys, lyricist and critic Gene Lees says they were “a pretty accurate portrait of his personality”. His playing was unequivocally articulate, but he seemed to physically shrink from the world. In a clip of Evans at the piano, his lanky, spare frame is almost curled in on himself with only his arms extended, long, tapering fingers murmuring across the keys. Photographed with the famous 1961 trio, he does not wear attention with Motian’s suave polish or bassist LaFaro’s affable grin. He hangs back, nursing a nervous smile. Even further back in the archives, Evans rarely breaks with his terse professorial persona. In footage of him smoking, the gaunt planes of his face are rendered in stark monochrome, eyes shaded over by his glasses, the set of his shoulders guarded. In his childhood photos, his neutral half-smile is unreadable. 

With a suite of exclusive interviews, Spiegel edges the curtain back on Evans, the man. Brother of Harry. Mentor to Scottie and Marc. Lover of Ellaine, Nennette and Laurie. Father to Evan. The warmth of his character bleeds through in his praise for LaFaro, enthusing “he was a constant inspiration to me.” You see his deep love for his family, in the uncontrollably fond smile of Debby Evans, Evans’s niece for whom he wrote Waltz for Debby, as she recalls their trips to the beach and her uncle and father, “two jazz brothers”, in animated conversation at the piano. Through Laurie Verchomin’s eyes the audience encounters Evans, the tender romantic, as she describes visiting him in New York at the start of their relationship. But we bear witness also to the corrosive self-doubt he laboured under. Bob Brookmeyer recounts how at the Cafe Bohemian with the Miles Davis Sextet, Evans was crouched in the corner, adamantly refusing to go on, insisting “I can’t play good, I can’t do this”. We see the sensitivity of his character, the weight of his grief. In the aftermath of LaFaro’s car accident, Evans, bewildered and in denial, admits “I can’t comprehend death,” with a trailing hesitance. Evans, falling silent at the piano midsong, tears streaming down his face, on the day his brother committed suicide. Talking to Zavatsky near the end of his life, Evans admits he can find no reason to stay alive. 

But this is no Hollywood tell-all. Rooted in their deference for him as a mentor and bandleader, they keep a respectful distance from the details of his personal life, particularly its painful episodes. Discussing Evans’s addiction, they hint at his “inner demons” without pinpointing them. But there are some telling flashes of emotion. The disdain is evident in Orrin Keepnews’s, Evans’s record producer, voice as he narrates “Almost imperceptibly, he became a junkie.” Lees unblinking intones,“I think he hurt a hell of a lot of people.” 

More than reconstructing his life, Spiegel brings Evans back into conversation. Recordings of Evans talking or playing bookend each segment, and the effect is disconcerting. The audience rarely sees Evans speaking on tape, mostly encountering him as a disembodied voice floating over monochromatic stills, an echo of the past. In his taciturn remarks, we are scrying for hints of his inner world as he moves forward through his turbulent life, while we look back, knowing what comes next. Evans’s work is an uncannily prescient soundtrack to the twists and turns of his life. The tender warmth of “Lucky To Be Me” (1959) accompanies rare childhood photos of him smiling toothily, arm in arm with his beloved brother, Harry. Its bittersweet undertones almost foretell Harry’s devastating suicide, which precedes Evans’s death by a year. Spiegel opens the discussion of Evans’s addiction with a foreboding passage from “NYC’s No Lark” (1963), as his colleagues recount what Gene Lees called “the longest suicide in history.” There in the music, Evans speaks back. 

I left the documentary feeling empty, forlorn. But I couldn’t quite pinpoint what about Evans’s life was so affecting. Was it in the way he passed, the abject irony of him succumbing on the way to rehabilitation? The turmoil of his personal life? Or the cruel symmetry, between the deeply-felt humanity of his work and his self-inflicted cruelty? Perhaps it was all of these, and that we want our heroes to be happy. Even if it was just a mirage constructed by pithy one-liners, a flash of a smile in a yellowing photograph, the sigh of a melody, I saw in Evans a kind, gentle character who might have deserved that happiness. 

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A musical history of Broken Greek

Acclaimed music critic Pete Paphides’s autobiography is a vivid account of a life illuminated by music.

“Do you sometimes feel like the music you’re hearing is explaining your life to you?” Broken Greek, by acclaimed British music journalist Pete Paphides, is a love letter to the magic of those electrifying, heart-rending and profoundly cathartic moments. In equal parts an autobiography and a pop music retrospective, Paphides assembles glittering fragments of daily life – his cross-cultural upbringing, scrappy schoolyard games of English football, the wonders and anxieties of boyhood and the music illuminating it all –  into a kaleidoscopic diorama of growing up in the 1980s in Acocks Green, Birmingham. With unfailing wit, candour and compassion, Paphides pays homage to the pivotal role of music in our lives and how the personal is deeply intertwined with the larger cultural moment. 

Paphides’s debut novel is about his halting, broken greek, his displacement from the cultural world of his immigrant parents, his gruff Cypriot father, Christakis Paphides, and his doting Greek mother, Victoria Paphides, and the yawning chasm between the family dinner table and the world beyond his front door a young, skittish Paphides had to cross. But this is more than a tale of insufficiencies. Over the ten years the book covers, we watch Paphides emerge from his four year long spell of selective mutism to venture into the unpredictable, technicolour the world beyond, and find the confidence to take his place in it. 

In spite of the book’s weighty subject matter – marital rifts, cultural displacement, the history of pop music itself – Paphides is undeniably hilarious. Despite the associations of long-windedness a 600 page debut novel tends to confer, Paphides’s writing is taut with insight and humour. Testament to his journalistic training, his writing marries character with concision, interspersing the profound and even the heartbreaking with zingers on his childhood escapades. Surging from one quip to the next, Paphides hurtles over large swathes of narrative ground, his readers in tow.  

51-year old father of two though he may be, Paphides is phenomenal at inhabiting the headspace of a 7-year old. He is resonant on the fears and foibles and guileless wonders of childhood, no matter how far into their past that may be for some readers. As someone with scattered memories at best of anything that happened before I was 10, I am in awe of his childhood powers of recollection and the sheer amount of detail he marshals. He captures the almost irrational but deeply intuitive way children react to music and the world around them, recalling how at age 7, the forlorn crooning of a Greek song his father enjoyed, “Cloudy Sunday” (Sinefiasmeni Kiriaki), shrouded him in a pallor of “imminent peril,” compounded by the disquieting sense that the pagan sun on the record sleeve was staring at him. The book narrates the series of anxieties the timid but winsome younger Paphides cycled through, ranging from the inane, like children’s television star Jimmy Osmond, to the morbid, such as his parents’ abandonment. Paphides also pays homage to the enduring role of music as “a periscope into (the adult) world,” a thrilling gateway of discovery for children. With minor adjustments, the scene he recounts of himself and two others whipped into an exhilarated frenzy by cameos of entry-level expletives in “Greased Lightnin’” could have been plucked from any reader’s childhood. 

Paphides leaves no room to doubt his journalistic credentials. Wielding the language of cultural critique with panache, he traces the arc of various musical styles and their accompanying aesthetics, bursting into and trailing out of vogue, and the intricate webs of calls and responses woven throughout the pop ecosystem. Paphides is in his element writing about pop music, authoritatively capturing the zeitgeist of a musical era in the turn of a phrase. Of the 1980s English 2 Tone and ska revival bands, he writes that they were “unified by an aesthetic that felt like the logical third act in the wake of the nihilism of punk and the crafted ennui of new wave.”  Even when outside the remit of his musical expertise, Paphides is cogent on the historical and musical context of his father’s favoured Greek music. He narrows the cultural gulf by highlighting the parallels to British pop, giving us a glimpse into his multicultural upbringing where these two cultures were different, but not separate. 

Though Paphides is separately competent as an autobiographer and a music journalist, what distinguishes Broken Greek is his marriage of the two. He lifts the latch on his innermost world where the chorus of ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money” coloured the silhouette of his father, bent over a chip fryer, toiling to provide for his family, strains of David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” curled themselves into the locks of his mother’s hair, splayed against the pillow of a hospital bed, and Leo Sayer’s “When I Need You” spoke for him in his petrified silence, wracked by guilt for his mutism.  

Rather than unravelling an imperial history of British pop music, developments in pop are told first through the eyes of Paphides the younger as a shortlist of potential adoptive parents from the Top of the Pops’, BBC’s weekly music chart show, to be tapped on if and when his parents abandon him. Paphides narrates the history of pop through the lens of what these songs meant to him. He describes how artists lent him the words and melodies for his nascent meanings as he navigated familial tensions and struggled with his perpetually dismal position in the schoolyard pecking order. Over the years, the varied artists gracing the radiowaves and record player were simultaneously chilling soothsayers presaging his fears for the future, spokespersons for his desires, and cooler, more confident versions of himself. Paphides pinpoints the impalpable yet powerful sense of communion we share with our music, declaring that music does not amplify our emotions, but that reality “(authenticates) the sentiments of the song.”

He is a faithful scribe not only to his own relationship with music, but also the musical obsessions of the people around him. He chronicles his brother and friends’ adolescent evolution accompanied and led by music. Writing about his brother Aki’s obsession with The Teardrop Explodes and neighbour Emily’s devotion to Adam Ant, he underscores how music could be an epiphany, a revelation not just about what music could sound like, but how you could dance, dress or talk. Who you, a hungry teenager facing the wilds of the world to come, could be. Even if Paphides does not inhabit his parent’s cultural universe, he reimagines their reality with compassion and patience. “For them music didn’t exist to enhance the present. It was a means of temporarily obliterating it” he writes. His parents’ indifference to the British pop juggernauts and his father’s insistence on Greek music are presented not as wilful ignorance, but reflections of the gruelling realities of supporting a family as immigrants cut loose from existing support structures.  

Broken Greek held my attention even though I am barely literate in the pop music canon of the 1970s and 80s, not an immigrant to the United Kingdom experiencing cultural displacement, or a fifty-something primed to gush with nostalgia by sepia-toned childhood recollections because Broken Greek was not written by Paphides the Greek-Cypriot immigrant or Paphides the music critic, but Paphides the music lover. As intimate and ephemeral as the relationship between a listener and their music is, it is also a familiar shared experience. By grounding the book in this experience, he anchors readers who might otherwise be swept away by the barrage of unfamiliar references or disoriented by the world of 1970s Birmingham.

Paphides’s focus on the inner world of his childhood and his experience of music means that a good portion of the book is devoted to his thoughts and feelings. The events of the book’s ten years are riveting, but do not command seismic degrees of drama. It can be argued he should have covered more ground, like the histrionics of late adolescence. At times the level of detail felt excessive given the repetitiveness and banality of the school-going routine he chronicles, especially in the blow by blow accounts of schoolyard soccer matches. But the authentic retelling of a life is perhaps less about communicating the sequence of events which occurred, than it is about parsing what they meant to the subject. By that standard, Paphides has authored a faithful and insightful account of his early childhood. 

But this begs the question – examining cultural eras populated by some of the most colourful public figures in recent memory, why should we care about the individual’s experience of music? Much ink has been spilt detailing the development of pop music and putting the lives of its icons under the microscope, rather than invoking them only as accessories to an individual’s bildungsroman. Yet, why is there still magic in Paphides’s worm’s eye view account?

In spotlighting the subjective experience of music, Paphides reveals how music is embedded in deeply personal realities. His most evocative writing on music is an act of imagination, rather than a dogmatic narration of the music’s factual provenance. He conjures these musicians from an age past with his childhood self’s vivid imagination, for instance asserting British pop group Racey’s Richard Gower’s “perpetually needy expression was somehow discernable merely by listening to his pleading delivery of the vocals.” Through these conjectures he locates the emotional core of the music, taking him closer to the heart of what earned artists like Bowie and The Clash pride of place in the pop pantheon for a generation of listeners than what a factual recapitulation could achieve. 

Conversely, when Paphides fails to balance factual details and his emotional relationship to the music, his critique can come across as ponderous. The anecdotal nuggets are necessary intermissions for those not intrinsically enthused by the biographical minutiae of ABBA. My attention wavers when he jumps into two page long close readings of songs, though to his credit he is discerning about which songs he spotlights. His trenchant critique and droll asides are elevated in the moments when music and autobiographical elements intertwine, speaking uncannily to each other across time and space through the tinny speakers of the household radiogram.

But more than that, the unique, subjective experience of music Paphides hones in on is precisely what makes up a cultural era. A pop cultural moment is only as powerful as its personal resonance. The cultural significance of ABBA of the Sex Pistols doesn’t derive from the millions album sales or number of weeks spent at number one on the charts. The magic of the pop phenomenon is located in living rooms and record stores, school fields and radios. It is in the raucous schoolyard debates of U2 versus Echo & the Bunnymen, a needling sibling rivalry because this was your band, so obviously your younger brother couldn’t be a fan too, in the flash of illumination, a teenager in a bedroom, listening to what feels like the anthem of his life. So why should our understanding of cultural history be limited to the bird’s eye view, looking down from the top of the chart or across the rolling expanse of the broader musical narrative? Pop has always been the music of the people, the elastic boundaries of the genre constantly shifting in response to the audience it is written for, defined only by the singular ability to resonate throughout the population; the grand narrative of pop would be incomplete without the account of the listeners at its heart. Broken Greek is not an autobiography accessorised by music, it is a sliver of musical history itself. 

 

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The Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto

Driven by his immutable sense of wonder, the Japanese techno, film and avant-garde musical giant is an indefatigable innovator.

At first glance, the 68-year-old Ryuichi Sakamoto exudes a professorial gravitas. He speaks in a rasping, measured tenor, and carries himself with an urbane reserve. From behind his tortoiseshell glasses, a sense of mystery permeates his steady gaze. Yet this severity and stillness belie his relentless exploration and unceasing sense of wonder which has propelled this pianist, composer and sound artist to the forefront of techno, film and avant-garde music over the course of his 40-year long career. Sakamoto has attained a rare longevity as part of the vaunted circle of maestros who have achieved what so many artists can only aspire to: a lifetime of artistic evolution and excellence. 

The title of his first solo effort, the experimental electronica album The Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1985), was aptly chosen, for Sakamoto wields his disparate musical identities with aplomb. The movie-going public may most immediately associate him with the elegiac main theme of Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), in which he nurses a tender, minimalist opening refrain into a crescendo of yearning and emotion. More recently, Sakamoto made waves as the Grammy-nominated composer for Iñárritu’s harrowing 2015 epic, The Revenant. His other collaborations with the renown director Bernado Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993), also earned critical acclaim. The highly decorated composer has won a Grammy, an Academy Award, a BAFTA award, a Grand Bell Award and two Golden Globes, in addition to an honorary Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. 

But before he was a greying, even-keeled film scorer, he was the heartthrob keyboardist and vocalist of the hyper-stylized, gleefully experimental and mischievously ironic electropop band, the three-piece Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978). The notoriously private Sakamoto found himself an unwilling celebrity, as YMO grew “bigger than the Beatles” in Japan. YMO was formed to satirise and celebrate the exotica genre popularised by American bandleaders Martin Denny and Les Baxter, subverting the Orientalist gaze to make exotica from a Japanese perspective. They were the original cyberpunks, the trailblazers for early hip hop, Japanese city pop, new wave and house, inspiring a legion of followers whose numbers include Joe Hisaishi of Studio Ghibli fame, hip-hop pioneer Afrikaa Bambaataa, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones and Eric Clapton. Over eight albums, YMO built lush, technicolour soundscapes with an array of rapidly evolving musical technology and ideas, replete with aesthetically committed music videos. Their music ranged from the sugary kitsch of “Rydeen,” where jittery 8-bit synths outlined melodic ideas from traditional Japanese folk over bouncing syndrum rhythms, to the lush, radio-friendly, 80s synth funk of “You’ve Got To Help Yourself,” to the club-ready acid house hit “Nanga Def.” Till today, we still hear the afterimages of YMO’s path breaking innovation in music as disparate as British techno and J-Pop. 

Sakamoto’s “butterfly punk” aesthetic 

Sakamoto has built a formidable personal brand as a producer, collaborator and solo artist, deftly drawing from the classical, jazz, pop, avant-garde and ambient traditions. David Sylvian, frontman of British New-Romantic act Japan, and Talking Heads and King Crimson guitarist, Adrian Belew, feature in his string of high profile collaborations. He demonstrates facility in the full spectrum of mediums, composing for solo piano, trio, orchestra, opera, multimedia installation, video games and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to boot, even acting in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor.

A charged moment with Sakamoto as Captain Yonoi and David Bowie as Major Jack Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence

The dizzying variety of his discography traces his relentless professional evolution, which stands testament to his unabating curiosity and genuine sense of wonder at the unknown. He describes himself in a 2019 interview as a “hungry man with lots of curiosities.” “I listen to all types of music and all types of music excite me,” he said in a 2020 radio interview. The classically-trained Sakamoto recounted how he had torn through and tired of the classical canon by the end of high school, entering National Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music for ethnomusicology and composition in hopes of making something new, informed by his diverse influences which ranged from Debussy to krautrock, with emerging musical technologies. 

Despite his mild-mannered conversational tone, Sakamoto does not shy away from taking controversial creative stances. He is a staunch individualist with a self-professed “strange personality” that resists being part of collectives preferring to work alone. Sakamoto rejects monozukuri, the widely revered and exoticised Japanese spirit of craftsmanship, arguing in a 2020 interview with the Financial Times that “true creativity is destructive… monozukuri is just polishing existing thinking” with a rare emotional pungence. He embraces destruction as crucial to creativity: in his radio interview he recounts how his second album B-2 Unit (1980) was born from the “urge to destroy the image I had with YMO” and one-time collaborator Aztec Camera describes Sakamoto as proactively building disruption into his workday, interrupting himself with ten minutes of house or hip hop “to corrupt what he knows… and to discover new things.” 

An expatriate musician writing for global audiences from his Manhattan apartment, Sakamoto is able to sit with cultural difference, describing “positive cultural shock” encountering punks in London in the 1980s in his Financial Times interview. “Shocking, but I really liked it,” he mused, modelling a non-judgemental curiosity and open-mindedness that would serve our multicultural societies well. Exploration is often seen as the province of the young, but Sakamoto has maintained this hunger for disruption, describing the radical, geometric musical approach of his long-time collaborator, alvo noto, with whom he toured in 2019, as “inspiring.”

Not all of Sakamoto’s exploration has landed well with critics. His 2000 performance at the Royal Albert Hall was panned by The Guardian as incomprehensible, a not uncommon criticism of experimental music. Sakamoto seems aware of this, astutely noting in his radio interview, “Just because it’s experimental doesn’t mean it’s good music.”  

The years have seen Sakamoto grow in his artistic maturity. He recalls how as a young upstart in film music, he wrote with single-minded focus on his music. He admitted that the poorer the film, the greater his incentive to write well to seize more of the spotlight. Now, he puts his music at the service of the film. Preferring an ambient, minimal approach in his recent work, Sakamoto seems to have put anthemic themes behind him. For Sakamoto the individualist, his prolific output of 24 soundtracks in the last 20 years represents a step out of his comfort zone, as he sees film music as a fundamentally collaborative act of musical translation. He confesses to the difficulty of satisfying multiple stakeholders in a 2016 interview, chuckling, “Literally every time I work on a film project, I say, this is it. This is it. No more soundtracks.” 

Sakamoto’s wide-ranging experimentation is complimented by his deep capacity for reflexive thought. He is keenly alive to the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of his creative pursuits. Rather than try to eke coherence out of his varied discography, he freely admits “When it comes to music I have a split personality,” comfortably straddling the division between analogue and digital, pop and experimental. Sakamoto counts the natural environment among his key inspirations. His 2017 biopic, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda portrays his sensitivity to beauty and joyful experimentation with shots of him rambling through the forest and listening to the patter of rain with a bucket over his head, in search of stories and sounds for his work. “The world is full of sounds,” he insists. “We just don’t hear them as music.” Yet he holds that music is “unnatural.” In the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor disaster, reflecting on an intact piano he found washed up by the tsunami, he saw parallels between nuclear power plants and pianos, both manipulating natural material into something unnatural. “If you think about it, the piano is a very unnatural instrument that was born from the Industrial Revolution,” Sakamoto puts forth in his radio interview. “There is a large plate of steel inside it… (and) about ten tonnes of force in the piano (from the strings).” The piano, ravaged by the tsunami, was not falling out of tune, as much as its warped wood and metal was trying to return to its natural state, the disaster having liberated it from the artificial imposition of mankind’s understanding of tonality. Music was akin to an abuse of nature. But for all this, Sakamoto declares that he needs to make music. “That’s the true desire. It’s contradictory, but somehow I have to survive through that.” 

Sakamoto’s concern with the natural and the unnatural goes beyond abstruse intellectual preoccupation. It’s a deeply felt, personal dilemma. Sakamoto was diagnosed with Stage III oropharyngeal cancer in 2014, which went into remission after a period of intensive radiotherapy, an excruciating period during which he could not work or even listen to music. He saw a connection between nature, the mangled piano and his own broken body, he shared with Slant Magazine in 2018. “Getting a disease is a process of nature. A tsunami and an earthquake are processes of nature. Being damaged by the force of nature is just another process.” This brought him solace but also doubt, he disclosed in his radio interview, if it was worth taking such extreme measures to prolong his life, to defy the course of nature. “But my desire to stay alive to make more music ended up being stronger.” 

Sakamoto examining a piano washed up by the deadly 2011 tsunami in Coda

In recent years, mortality has undoubtedly become a key creative focus. Pre-empting critics, he candidly offers in a 2018 Guardian interview, “It’s not sad. I just meditate about it.” In Coda he chases a “perpetual sound,” a musical symbol of immorality. Sakamoto may come across as cerebral, but his art, perhaps now more than ever, is grounded in his tender humanity. His latest solo effort, async (2017), is awash with haunting contemplation, the melancholy orchestral instrumentals and sampled textures coalescing into a fragile meditation on mortality. Through the gloom, he offers us the bittersweet, luminous rays of resolution – he quotes poet Arseny Tarkovsky on “Life, Life,” singer David Sylvian intoning “Life is a wonder of wonders, and to wonder / I dedicate myself.”

Sakamoto’s understated humour is a counterpoint to his somber reflections. His austere countenance, once set in motion in convivial conversation, lights up into a twinkling smile, suffused with a gentle warmth and hidden, almost childlike mirth. His humour tends towards wry, self-effacing impishness. Describing his upbringing as the son of an editor, he recounts in his 2018 Guardian interview, “(many) wannabe writers and novelists came to the house and there was a lot of drinking until the morning, and lots of books in the house, which we had to avoid so the piles didn’t collapse on us. Very cultural!” He reminisced about another episode in London, 1979, where he saw a trendy couple in a club dancing to his song, The End of Asia. “I just thought, ‘Wow! They are so fashionable and cool … but we were the ones that made them dance … so, wow, we must be really cool too!’” he recalled with glee in 2009. 

Sakamoto during a lighthearted moment at the 2019 Singapore International Festival of Arts 

Sakamoto has aged gracefully into a musical elder statesman, stepping out of his habitual reticence to employ his celebrity in service of anti-nuclear and copyright law advocacy, amongst other causes. Sakamoto spearheaded the international awareness campaign, Stop Rokkasho, to demand the closure of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant in 2006 and was at the forefront of the anti-nuclear demonstrations after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown. In 2009, in an exclusive with The Guardian, he argued that copyright law was antiquated for the information age and a return to “tribal” attitudes towards music. 

Even after a prolific 40 years, Sakamoto is clearly not done yet. My only quibble with his biopic is that its title, coda, feels premature. His work since his return after his cancer went into remission does not read like a final triumphant recapitulation of his achievements, but the beginning of a new chapter, informed by new creative concerns. He is currently working on a new solo record and an opera, to be announced in 2021. 

Sakamoto is more than the man behind Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Throughout a back catalog spanning genres, collaborators and continents, Sakamoto has relentlessly reinvented himself. His artistic metamorphosis is born of an unsentimental, radical willingness to challenge his status quo, but also of his earnest reflection, his willingness to wade into what is most keenly felt and vital, and most of all, his immutable sense of wonder. Sakamoto is not ready to draw his musical odyssey to a close, declaring, “I’m seeking something new, something unknown to my ear.” 

 

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A mixed bag of Baybeats

A Cornellian at home surveys the Singaporean music scene

Many Singaporeans listen to a cosmopolitan mix of music, yet struggle to sing along to local musicians. Events like Baybeats, one of Singapore’s biggest local music festivals, are a sorely needed chance to spotlight our homegrown talent. 

Due to Covid-19, the nine acts of Baybeats Unplugged have been uprooted from their usual location, the Esplanade, Singapore’s premier performance location which resembles an overturned half of a durian, the fifteen minute acoustic sets posted instead on the event Facebook page. Annette Lee, the first act, has perfectly serviceable vocals, but her lyrics are at once bland and oversaturated with saccharine pep. The seasonal metaphor in “Spring Will Always Come” quickly comes unmoored as she warbles how “it’s pretty cold” in the winter of life while I melt in tropical Singapore’s 95F heat.

I want to like Mannequins, a rock band with a 90s sound and goofy humour. But their anthems can’t achieve liftoff and I wince as their frontman unleashes a gem of tautology, “I know I think I thought I knew,” clinching the dubious honour of the festival’s most insipid lyric. 

At this point, I am ready to give up on Baybeats. But the Facebook algorithm gods do me a solid, shepherding me towards Bakers in Space, a refreshingly experimental surprise landing in the ballpark of indie-rock and psychedelia. The chromatic action in “Citrus” strings tension throughout the song with hovering, disoriented harmonies, perfectly describing a bewildering love affair. The post-chorus offers tantalising nuggets of resolution, only to flicker back into confusion as it alternates between two chords. Their second piece, “Autumn,” is mired in self reflection. Lead vocal Eugene Soh pulls the audience into a swirl of doubt, the harmony brooding. He concludes, “my mind is going,” followed by an instrumental breakdown recalling the innocence of a lullaby. The addictive bass line and crunchy guitar riffs on their third piece, “Mindfield,” affirm this is a band with an abundance of ideas who bear repeated listening. 

 

Finally, the long-awaited headline act. Baybeats park their best act in the literal basement, the regionally acclaimed Charlie Lim performing in the Esplanade’s garage. He opens with a personal favourite, “Choices.” His voice simmers with tension and heartache, papered over by a gentle calm as he begins a late-night conversation with an old lover, coaxing “keep your eyes on me darling, I’m not a magic trick.” He lets a plaintive edge bleed into the second verse, imploring “I can take complication, if I can comprehend.” Deftly walking the line between plainspoken and poetic, he unravels what it means to nurse love through differences. He employs the same articulate honesty and understated delivery in “Least of You,” a more forthrightly pining ballad. His final song, “Pedestal,” is the mischievous counterpoint to the previous two, a sarcastic, bluesy anti-love song subverting the trope of elevating lovers. He showcases his versatility, taking his voice a notch more theatrical and playing adroitly with rhythm, even swinging easily into a guitar solo. 

I came into Baybeats looking to survey local music. But what is Singaporean music supposed to sound like? The debate is not new. Singapore’s periodic spasms of identity crisis are particularly afflicted by self-doubt, owing to our short independent history, multicultural constitution and colonial hang-ups, among other factors. It’s telling that one of our most visceral manifestations of identity, Singlish, a creole of English, Malay and Chinese dialects, is seen as out of place in most public and professional settings, explaining the dissonance between the performer’s quasi-American accented singing and speaking voices. 

It is unreasonable to throw the full burden of resolving this interminable debate on local artists. At campus music events, I’ve never asked performers to prove their Cornellian or American credentials. Yet, I held Baybeats to a higher standard of crafting a unique, culturally-specific cool without falling into tacky cliches, on top of music-making’s routine complexity. Perhaps, as musicians already know and I am belatedly realising, rather than trying to make good Singaporean music, it is enough to make good music, unabashed of who we are. 

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And yet, China sings

In spite of its gimmicks, the 10 year old Chinese reality singing competition, Sing! China, maintains its calling power with its earnest performances.Sing! China - Wikipedia

I am of the dying breed of consumers unable to follow any television series to completion, even with Netflix forcing the next episode on me. I have little patience in particular, for overwrought reality shows driven by needlessly hysterical scripts. And yet, every Friday at 9pm sharp, you’ll find me watching Sing! China, a reality singing competition with a blind audition concept. 

Sing! China is replete with the foibles of reality television. All are welcome, but most contestants have professional training, and everyone on the first episode mysteriously succeeds. Product placement is as subtle as a giant milk bottle mascot dancing in the stands. All media is political; this is no exception. Contestants returning from abroad declare their renewed national pride and the finals begin with a patriotic song. That this season was filmed at all, with an unmasked studio audience no less, declares the Chinese success in managing the coronavirus while other countries grapple with lockdown. 

But despite the show’s affectations, the sincerity of the performances prevail. 

Zhao Zi Hua (赵紫骅), a thirty-three-year-old independent musician, looks utterly unassuming, as he takes the stage to sing his composition, Because You Came By. He does not sing as much as speak in his warm tenor, asking the audience “what hurt do you carry? ”(你带着什么伤) with a forthrightness that cuts to the quick as he sketches the uncertain road through adversity to aspirations. The conversation turns inward into an interrogation, and his answers are devastating in their unflinching truth. Though many have spoken to this subject, he is distinguished by his genuine delivery. When he says he is searching for a path through life’s uncertainties, you believe it, because he sings with his voice so charged with vulnerability and stripped of pretense. He does not belabour the point, but narrates with a calm, unblinking honesty what feels like hard-won truths in a few sparse lines of life-affirming poetry. 

If Zhao’s calling card is his time-weathered wisdom, his competitors, Zebra Forest (斑马森林), a three piece band of twenty-somethings, are the youthful exuberance of big dreams and beginnings. In their composition Lighthouse, they’re easy on the ears with their radio-friendly hooks and guitar-heavy pop sound, if a little generic. Their appeal doesn’t derive from the technical complexity of their performance, but their candour. The lead vocal croons with an uncomplicated belief about summer evenings sprawled on the grass and chasing dreams in a big city far away, and you nod along in spite of yourself. Their writing and delivery needs fine-tuning, but still they moved the most serious judge to grudgingly groove along. I’m hopeful that I’ll hear them on the radio in a few years, topping the charts. 

Like most other televised singing competitions, Sing! China is plagued by advertising spectacles, tacky branding and all the other uncomfortable accoutrements of reality television. But the sincerity of its contestants and their music will keep me coming back, week after week, and for seasons to come. 

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Across language, through love

On Korean indie-rock standard bearers Hyukoh’s latest, connecting with the listener comes first, understanding their lyrics is optional. 

“through love,” Korean alternative phenoms Hyukoh’s (pronounced “he-ah-go”) January 2020 EP, takes you on a sonic odyssey – from bossa-inspired languor, to roguish garage rock, to its final manic, keening outpouring of emotion. Deviating from their previous album’s driving anthems, this is testament to Hyukoh’s commitment to constant reinvention, and is a riveting offering for Korean and global audiences. 

Hyukoh has achieved domestic prominence in a scene commanded by balladeers and idol groups. They have won global plaudits, their album 22 (2015) peaking at fourth on Billboard. Hyukoh consists of lead guitarist Lim Hyun Jae, bassist Im Dong Geon, drummer Lee In Woo and multilingual vocalist and guitarist, Oh Hyuk, who writes English and Korean lyrics. Though the band takes their name from their frontman, the instrumentalists are no slouch. On this six-track EP, Oh’s vocals are kept to a muted murmur, leading into the emphatic instrumentals which do the melodic heavy lifting. 

The first three tracks, “Help,” “Hey Sun” and “Silverhair Express” are bossa-infused grooves for lazy afternoons, hopefully spent near a sunny beach far from responsibilities. If you are unfortunately desk bound, these songs are a reasonably effective escape. 

“Help” is a leisurely, minimalist opener, oozing urbane chic, with a hint of mystery in Oh’s understated drawl. It outlines the template of the coming songs – bossa beat, echoing guitar hook, Oh’s raspy murmur. A sprinkling of unconventional percussion and a flute solo provide a welcome change of texture. The resulting tune is pleasant but unarresting, content to meander into the background. 

“Hey Sun” is a stronger endeavour at this format. In this languid yet teasing take on quotidian tedium, Oh switches between an airy falsetto and his grittier lower register as he dangles the prospect of another day of repetition. The lyrics are mirrored by incomplete arcs of suspense and resolution as the verses build anticipation, but on the very cusp of payoff, deflate. There’s partial release when the instrumentals swell into shadowy harmonies and synths – but almost immediately, we’re back on the crescendo, vocals swathed in a halogenic cloud of synths, cymbals trembling in a sparkling haze. The song never fully resolves, the listener left suspended and searching. 

The lush soundscape of “Silverhair Express” feels like a fortified version of “Help.” It drifts a touch more fantastical, the guitars an opalescent blur of distortion, ornamented by glittering marimba and flute snippets. The song ends in disintegrating chords which wobble off key with increasingly incredulity, mirroring the reviewer stirring from this sunlit daze, only to be confronted by looming deadlines and assignments. Hyukoh closes with a final echo of the melody, the last wisps of a dream clinging to consciousness. 

From here the EP takes a darker turn. On “Flat Dog,” Hyukoh reprises the garage rock of their back catalogue. The fizzing lead guitar swoops wide and low over the thumping beat and Oh delivers his lines in clipped jabs. In the bridge the whole band heaves on the downbeat in a jangling, percussive crash. With every line, the harmony goes up third, upping the ante till Oh’s vocals are at his most histrionic and the guitar roils scratchy and belligerent. After the delayed gratification of the earlier songs, this is a straightforwardly rewarding stadium banger.  

“World of the Forgotten” offers a momentary pause, sinking the listener into a reflective space. Translucent synths trace the afterimages of Oh Hyuk’s searching croon, “wait I know you, but where did I meet you?” This bittersweet sound is familiar territory for Hyukoh, and they expertly evoke nostalgia and the lull between wakefulness and sleep. The song fizzes out in a static crackle, an otherworldly hint of what is to come. 

“New born,” the penultimate track, is a 8 minute 45 sec long behemoth of cinematic scale and emotional heft. It opens with a moody lower register riff over a simmering distorted lead guitar. The guitar’s guttural, metallic hum after the first verse is unexpectedly meditative, like the flickering outline of a thought taking shape. Rising out of the instrumentals’ monochromatic expanse, the throbbing drums and synths crest in a brooding surge of pace and intensity – till we lurch into freefall, the distortion wailing free, wheeling in and out of harmony. Sheets of static break against its side, like the hissing roar of an equatorial downpour. The dulcet swell Oh’s vocals, echoing like a choir in an empty room, rises into this gale of spectral distortion, soothing over the guitar’s jagged grain. The listener plummets into the harmony, discord, exuberance and chaos of Hyukoh’s sonic universe, like an infant overwhelmed by the sensory barrage of a new world.  

Then the storm seems to quiet, the guitars dwindling into microtonal trills, before morphing unexpectedly into the rattle of a car engine, or aeroplane. Hyukoh thrusts us into an uncanny sonic portrait of our everyday lives, constructed by swathes of nondescript rumble which could equally be construction, traffic or footsteps. Static crackle weaves and dodges, through train tracks and highways and the roadside clatter of your childhood home, blurring the line between Hyukoh’s spectral world and reality. Abruptly, the noise cuts. The riff comes back, a gentle, muted promise, echoing into darkness. “New born” is sound and fury signifying something inexplicable and profound, Hyukoh at their experimental best.  

In “through love,” Hyukoh adroitly traverse genres . There are occasional pacing missteps, but I’m inclined to excuse it as the process of experimentation. This release reasserts the band as a force to be reckoned with on the K-Indie scene and for that matter, globally. There’s a common but reductive view that English-speakers have little business listening to non-English music, particularly in pop where there is a premium placed on music being immediately accessible to the everyman. Why should you listen if you don’t know what they’re saying? But I think there’s a strong case for exploring music you don’t understand. 

To start, you discover new palettes of harmony and rhythm. Languages lend themselves to different rhythms and there are subtle differences between music from different places within the same genre. Further, not understanding lyrics can increase your enjoyment. Inane lyrics can be immensely grating, so listening to music in a language I don’t speak is a little bit of “don’t ask don’t tell” cop out. 

But most crucially, understanding lyrics is not necessary to communicating meaning. We encounter music fundamentally at an aural level, before we process its language. When you listen to Bon Iver on 715 – CR∑∑KS, or Jeff Buckley on Hallelujah, it’s the pleading in their voices that hits you, before the poetry in their lyrics. If a vocalist is expressive enough, you don’t need to understand what they’re saying to hear heartbreak or swagger or comfort. The music speaks for itself. Rhythm, harmony and tone are the building blocks of its deeply affective language. Lyric-less music, from classical to math rock, has always found a devoted following. Some even argue linguistic space creates greater engagement, through deeper focus on the music, or listeners bringing their own meaning to the piece. I thought “New born” was about an initiation into a wondrous yet bewildering world, but the lyrics recount the end of a relationship. The track’s roaring static and howling guitars will probably mean something different to another listener, but this multiplicity of meaning doesn’t dilute the artist’s intention – it strengthens the vitality of the art. 

Good lyrics can reinforce a musical narrative or add an unexpected twist. But they are never the totality of a song’s meaning. Even in daily life, so little of what is said is in our words. Meaning lives also in inflection, body language, silence. Storytelling is at the heart of being human, and we have a plethora of tools beyond language for it. 

Hyukoh may be Korean, but that is no barrier to the evocative power of their music.  The only criteria to enjoy them, or music from anywhere in the world, is an open mind and a listening ear. 

Listen on Spotify, Youtube or Deezer 

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Coronavirus and Collier

(Alternately titled: All I did was listen to one song on loop)

Contrasted against the dire events of the pandemic summer, music and entertainment can seem frivolous. But caught in these endless two week cycles of watching and waiting for coronavirus updates, it is precisely music’s escapist quality, how it enraptures and transports us, which makes it so vital. 

I’m not about to make the claim that jazz wunderkind Jacob Collier’s collaboration with Grammy-nominated Rapsody, “He Won’t Hold You,” is a panacea or even placebo for the very real problems we face. But for a few minutes, it illuminates time, as Collier delivers a powerful elegy for a moment of loss.

The opening gospel choir is plaintive and raw, singing the refrain in equal parts pleading and adamant that “he won’t hold you/ like I do”. Any hint of bitterness in the language is eased by the warmth of the harmonies – rich, bittersweet compound (mostly) major chords punctuating every word, supported by swelling base synths and accented by dulcet trills on the harp and piano. 

He pans the harmonies even wider in the verse to capture a vast sea of sound and colour. But this track is at its most moving in the bridge when the choir surges forward, insisting  “I won’t be alright”, full-throated and anguished on the bass kick, then ebbing into silence with a sigh. 

Collier rarely sings as a solo voice, his multitracked vocals draping mellifluous over the instrumentation. But when we do get Collier on his own, whispering “sing it again” over a lofi crackle, or when the choir frays into individual exhales, these moments create a sense of intimacy.

Collier’s previous work has been criticised for overshadowing emotion with technical gymnastics, but in this song his prodigious talents serve the sincerity of the music. “He Won’t Hold You” speaks keenly to this moment in our lives with a story of longing, heartbreak and ultimately, redemption.