Her style draws on many sources, but seems indebted to no single tradition. “I’ve been inspired by so many people,” Saito says. “My mentors Prof. Keiko Abe and Prof. David Friedman; the playing and compositions of Kenny Wheeler; a lot of traditional Japanese music—tea ceremony, ikebana, etc. But I was always looking for my own sound.”
That personal sound is on full display on this remarkable recording, her first recorded solo outing since 2008. Saito explains that she took three basic approaches to creating the music—completely spontaneous, developing an initial motif, and experimentation with sound and the characteristics of mallets and sticks.
Most of the album is totally improvised with no preconceived ideas. Anything might happen once she starts. For instance, “Daichi” alternates between pregnant silences and eruptions of phrases, balancing stillness and sound. Using heavy leather mallets that she handmade herself, Saito explores unique tones with a feeling for proportion, shape, and spontaneous structure. On another improvised piece, “Uneri,” Saito creates a unique sound world by using the vibraphone’s open pedal and motor to make clouds of resonant notes that enshroud her flowing lines. On the title track, gently throbbing overtones also form a backdrop for a delicate improvised melody that grows deliberately note by note.
On other pieces, Saito takes a motif and develops it over the course of her improvisation. On “Rain,” her motifs mimic the irregular rhythms of nature, achieving a graceful asymmetry as they lengthen and morph into a continuous dance of notes. On “Sound Gradation” she ingeniously manipulates rhythmic motifs, subtly shifting accents in the melodic material and using different mallets to create new tone colors. The result is varied yet unified.
And then there’s the arresting “Underground I,” a sound exploration on which Saito uses a double bass bow and two oversized soft sticks. The wide range of textures and colors reveal her to be an explorer of the marimba’s sonic potential, unafraid to push the limits of the instrument’s capacity for new sounds with deep emotional resonances.
Award-winning mallet player-composer Taiko Saito was born in 1976 in Sapporo and studied with marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe and classical marimba and percussion at the Toho School of Music. In 1997 she began to improvise and to write music, and moved to Berlin to study vibraphone and composition with David Friedman at the Universität der Künste Berlin. In 2003 she co-founded Koko, a marimba/vibraphone-piano duo with German jazz piano player Niko Meinhold. Their self-titled debut album was released in 2005 and Live in Bogotá was released in 2014. Together with Rupert Stamm, she also created the jazz mallets duo Patema whose recording was released by Zerozero in 2007. She is a founding member of the Berlin Mallet Group, which also includes her former teacher Friedman. She is a co-founder of Futari, a duo with pianist-composer Satoko Fujii, and also performs with Fujii and drummer Yuko Oshima in Trio San. In addition, Saito has performed and recorded with the Trickster Orchestra and saxophonist Silke Eberhard’s Potsa Lotsa XL. As a soloist, Taiko has appeared with the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra and with Orchestra d´Auvergne in France. As a composer, she won the originality prize in the International Marimba Competition 2004 for “Landscape IV.” In 2008 she wrote “Hide and Seek for 9 percussionists,” commissioned by the percussion ensemble coup de baguette. In addition to Tears of a Cloud, Saito is also featured on Wald, a trio album with drummer Michael Griener and bassist Jan Roder also coming out in 2023 via Trouble in the East Records.
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