Yamamoto, who began writing music at the age of 8, describes composition as a daily habit, “like a diary, very related to what I experience or feel.” Keep that in mind as you listen to the seven pieces that comprise A Woman With A Purple Wig, her second recording for Mahakala Music, on which the veteran pianist, a melody-maker par excellence, presents her response to the dislocations and traumas of life in locked-down New York City following the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020.
“After the former President’s remarks on the ‘China virus,’ many Asians, especially women, were targeted,” recalls Yamamoto, born in Osaka, raised in Kyoto, now a midtown Manhattan resident. One day, a month or two after lockdown, she rode her electric bicycle to an outdoor session downtown, then waited for the other musicians. “Suddenly a huge guy snatched my helmet out of the air and said, ‘You fucking Chinese messed up my life and the world’ – then he stepped on my backpack with my small keyboard inside. I’m a strong New Yorker – fortunately, my instrument was okay and I did the session. I’d never had that kind of experience. To me, New York welcomes people from all over the world. Of course, I’m Japanese, but I never thought of myself as an Asian – and all of a sudden, that’s how some people see me. I got very scared. For two years, I went out only once a month, and I bought a purple wig to hide myself when I had to go outside, along with big sunglasses, a mask, and a hat.”
As always in her life, Yamamoto expressed her feelings through the medium of notes and tones. In a concentrated burst of creative activity, she penned five instrumental compositions and, for the first time, two songs with lyrics – “A Woman With A Purple Wig” and “Colors Are Beautiful.” Then she made a demo on her iPhone. At a rehearsal for an imminent recording session with bass giant William Parker, a dear friend who has availed himself of her talents on nine recordings since 2002, she asked Parker to listen. She had a singer in mind, but Parker immediately suggested that Yamamoto sing it herself.
“He told me, ‘Your voice is more connected to the lyrics you wrote; this is your experience and your voice has the honesty of a child singing,’” she says. “I wasn’t sure – but then I decided, yeah, why not? I want to speak out to the world what I felt. And I did it with my trio.”
A Woman With A Purple Wig is Yamamoto’s eleventh trio album, and her seventh with bassist David Ambrosio and drummer Ikuo Takeuchi, who’ve developed their breathe-as-one simpatico over close to two decades of a three-nights-a-week sinecure at the Greenwich Village boite Arthur’s Tavern. She recalls meeting Takeuchi – her drummer-of-choice on gigs and albums since 1998 – when both attended the New School in the late 1990s. A trained classical pianist during her years in Japan, Yamamoto had “almost zero exposure to jazz” until undergoing a “conversion experience” after hearing Tommy Flanagan’s trio at Tavern on the Green on a visit to New York in 1995.
“I knew Mal Waldron’s song ‘Left Alone,’ and he was playing at Sweet Basil the week I got to New York,” Yamamoto says. “After the first set, I asked Mal Waldron to help me to find a school or teacher to teach me jazz. He introduced me to Reggie Workman, who was playing bass; Reggie wrote on a paper napkin the address of the New School, ‘tomorrow, 1 o’clock’ and ‘you’ll be okay.’” For her audition, Yamamoto played a blues and “Autumn Leaves,” which “I’d transcribed, mixed up, and memorized.” She was accepted.
During Yamamoto’s three years at the New School, Workman consistently offered encouragement and sage advice. “Reggie told me trio was perfect for my style, and to find a bass player and drummer in school,” she says. “While I was walking around, I heard Ikuo playing a session and loved what I heard, so I asked him. It was fortuitous, because that was his last day at the New School. I got a restaurant gig every Friday. Reggie told me, ‘Just play. Make mistakes. Jazz is music to play for real people, not a practice room music.’ I didn’t have experience, but I have perfect pitch. If I hear it, I can re-play. So I was imitating people. People thought, ‘Ah, Eri has zero experience in jazz, but she is not fooling around.’ At first everything was written and messy, but after a few years, I felt pretty comfortable.
“I thought it was important to learn bebop vocabulary and the blues to have a good foundation to express my music – so I focused on that. But I was thinking that, as a Japanese in New York, trying to play like a musician who grew up in America is not the real me. I was wondering what I can do. Then I went to a festival at the old Knitting Factory, where everyone from Cecil Taylor and William Parker to Wynton Marsalis was playing. I heard a trio with Paul Motian, Gary Peacock and Paul Bley, who I was not familiar with. I felt so relieved. I didn’t know this is also called jazz. Bley’s improvisation was sometimes folky, sometimes bluesy – such a mixture. I found the similarities what I really hear in music and really want to pursue.”
You can hear snippets and murmurs of the vocabularies and syntaxes of the aforementioned refracted in Yamamoto’s playing – elegant and primal, nuanced and urgent, endlessly melodic and rhythmically piquant, always oriented to collective imperatives – throughout the proceedings. But the sound, as throughout Yamamoto’s 20-years as a recording artist, is uniquely her own, bearing out yet again Herbie Hancock’s encomium, “She’s found her own voice.”
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