Kitaro’s mid-life crisis

Meditative musings were left at the concert-hall door Tuesday night when the Japanese ‘New Age’ maestro abandoned cricket chirps and water drips for the soundtrack to a bad day in Baghdad.

Paul Dorsey
The Nation
Published on September 17, 2004
Kitaro’s concert on Tuesday night at BEC-Tero Hall was chockfull of a single surprise. The farmer’s boy from Toyohashi must be fed up with being called a New Age musician, because he spent most of his two hours onstage hammering out decibels like the rocker he probably always deep down wanted to be.
Anyone hoping to bliss out on butterfly wings – or perhaps catch a few winks – must have been headachingly disappointed.
Apart from a few gorgeous glimpses of glissando and the always rewarding melodic magic of the “Silk Road” theme, the near-capacity, all-ages crowd dined on a main course of furious percussion and guitar that bit back.
Some people did manage to nod off – and scores walked out after “Silk Road”, the sixth of a 10-piece set – but that was only because much of what had preceded, despite the incongruous loudness in a hall not built for music, had been dismayingly flat and uninspiring.
In “Hajmari-Sozo”, “Orochi” and “Koi”, the sense of wonderment one hears on Kitaro’s albums was chased off by his nothing-up-my-sleeves posturing and bottomless riff-chasing. The lustral textures for which he’s famous were overpowered by pomp and circumstance.
Maybe Kitaro, born Masanori Takahashi 50 years ago, is having a mid-life crisis. The “man of love and joy”, as his adopted name translates, wasn’t bouncing cricket chirps off a pond, he was thrashing through a bad impression of Yes, with all the excesses of the solo Rick Wakeman.
He abandoned the keyboards for a good chunk of time to worry a guitar, his original instrument after being inspired by BB King and Otis Redding, and on “Water of Mystery” even fought an axe duel with his swift-fingered accompanist Manabu Takahashi.
The concert really found a full measure of elegance only in the latter stages, after his Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning theme from the Oliver Stone film “Heaven and Earth” had exhausted the broad dynamic of sensual Chinese flute and pounding war drums.
“Cocoro Part 1” and “Matsuri” had Takahashi, violinist Yayoi Sakiyama, percussionist Tomoko Nomura, drummer Hideo Ono and keyboardists Shinji Ebihara and Keiko Takahashi (Kitaro’s wife) breathing as one for a sumptuous double treat that had none of the cacophony of earlier pieces.
Kitaro cooled it a bit on the dial-twisting too, but even when he shifted over to play Vulcan Kodo drummer against Ono’s full-kit barrages, there was passion in the ferocity, where before there had been just rote noise and workmanlike performance.
The applause at show’s end wasn’t as deafening as much of the music, but it was enough that the band returned after a moment to be introduced by the boss.
Kitaro, who lives in Colorado, said a few words in English – thanks, been a long time, we’ll be back soon – and then “The Light of the Spirit”, opening with harmonica, finally established that he and his friends were indeed interested in presenting the kind of music their audience was expecting.
This is a man worshipped by some as a “musician-saint”, who comes across in a lot of the promotional hype as a Rocky Mountain Shinto hermit who makes pilgrimages to Japan to tour the temples.
His poetry (“I send a message of sound, towards the Sky, engulfing empty Space, soaring far beyond grasp”) has people like the Kitaro Team swooning.
The “leading New Age composer” (in competition with whom – Yanni?) can take any three-note riff and turn it into a 20-minute symphony of synthesiser and sound effects.
But maybe Kitaro understands too well that three notes do not a symphony make and, without actually yielding the voiceless pose of an orchestra conductor, has decided for now to can the water drips and ephemeral wind chimes and, for lack of a better term, rock out.