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WHERE IS KONDO?
WHERE IS KONDO?
My involvement with the late Toshinori Kondo took place in a just a few of the many years that marked his distinguished career.
It was during the late ‘70s when Kondo and his wife Shizu took up temporary residence in New York City. He had a student visa at the time but liked to tell people he was learning most of his English from me as we were spending much time out of town on a series of extended tours.
Steve Beresford pointed out the small string of dates we did as a trio in the UK during that time, beginning with York. Kondo and I played in New York City the night before, flew over to London, met Steve for a train and thus went from New to Old York in 24 hours.
This was the beginning of a lengthy exploration of the European improvised music scene, Kondo and I tried to play with as many luminaries as we could. We went on to Holland and a trio with Han Bennink, documented on the Leo double CD entitled Jazz Bunker. In Italy we played and recorded with Andrea Centazzo, this material was released many years later on an Ictus collection. In Germany we played with Paul Lovens, Paul Lytton and Evan Parker, then crashed an improv gathering in Wuppertal where we got a bit of a chance to play, I got to hear Kondo do a duet with Leo Smith which was very nice. Back in England we were invited to play with John Stevens at his weekly gig at The Plough pub and made nuisances out of ourselves trying to disrupt his jazz/rock trip.
Mainly we concentrated on what we were doing with our duo, spending hours and hours talking about it and coming up with splendid proclamations such as “Best part: No meaning!” The main rule in our improvisations was that anything goes, and anything could be done at the same time as another anything, and some of the anything might not even be music, it might be actions taken of some sort, theatrical shenanigans loosely (or not) described by Kondo as “doing.”
Our performances were largely received in Europe with horror. We may have gone over better in the states, New York for sure, also I have nice memories of a Southern swing by Greyhound bus, the performance in Knoxville made up one side of the album “Possibilities of the Color Plastic” and was something I was always proud of.
Kondo was not part of the Shockabilly, Chadbournes country and rock evolution in the long run but was an important part of birthing its original conception, giving me the okay to perform a cover version of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ Steppin’ Out.
An unfinished project from the 1980 Japanese tour was to be an insane live LP consisting of one minute excerpts from each of the concerts we had done.
Inevitably two major pieces of documentation surfaced. A recording engineer in Calgary had a duet recording of Kondo and I, he couldn’t figure out where it had come from until we realized local guitarist Randy Hutton had taped the show on his reel to reel while on a visit to NYC. In drummer David Licht’s stash of cassette tapes was the complete show from the Niteshade Café in Greensboro—my first complete show in Greensboro and the first show I ever did with Licht. The original plan called for two shows in two venues, across the street from each other, on Tate Street. The first night, the Belstone Fox venue fired us after 20 minutes.
The reception the next night was much better, raucous even. It planted the idea in my head that Greensboro would be a good home ground for performing strange creative music, which turned out to be a good hunch.
I combined the music from the NYC and Greensboro shows plus a trio jam with Steve Beresford from Studio Henry in NYC for the double CD entitled Where is Kondo?, the title coming from the difficulties of contacting him, the joke was whatever set of coordinates one was provided with would not work.
My involvement with the late Toshinori Kondo took place in a just a few of the many years that marked his distinguished career.
It was during the late ‘70s when Kondo and his wife Shizu took up temporary residence in New York City. He had a student visa at the time but liked to tell people he was learning most of his English from me as we were spending much time out of town on a series of extended tours.
Steve Beresford pointed out the small string of dates we did as a trio in the UK during that time, beginning with York. Kondo and I played in New York City the night before, flew over to London, met Steve for a train and thus went from New to Old York in 24 hours.
This was the beginning of a lengthy exploration of the European improvised music scene, Kondo and I tried to play with as many luminaries as we could. We went on to Holland and a trio with Han Bennink, documented on the Leo double CD entitled Jazz Bunker. In Italy we played and recorded with Andrea Centazzo, this material was released many years later on an Ictus collection. In Germany we played with Paul Lovens, Paul Lytton and Evan Parker, then crashed an improv gathering in Wuppertal where we got a bit of a chance to play, I got to hear Kondo do a duet with Leo Smith which was very nice. Back in England we were invited to play with John Stevens at his weekly gig at The Plough pub and made nuisances out of ourselves trying to disrupt his jazz/rock trip.
Mainly we concentrated on what we were doing with our duo, spending hours and hours talking about it and coming up with splendid proclamations such as “Best part: No meaning!” The main rule in our improvisations was that anything goes, and anything could be done at the same time as another anything, and some of the anything might not even be music, it might be actions taken of some sort, theatrical shenanigans loosely (or not) described by Kondo as “doing.”
Our performances were largely received in Europe with horror. We may have gone over better in the states, New York for sure, also I have nice memories of a Southern swing by Greyhound bus, the performance in Knoxville made up one side of the album “Possibilities of the Color Plastic” and was something I was always proud of.
Kondo was not part of the Shockabilly, Chadbournes country and rock evolution in the long run but was an important part of birthing its original conception, giving me the okay to perform a cover version of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ Steppin’ Out.
An unfinished project from the 1980 Japanese tour was to be an insane live LP consisting of one minute excerpts from each of the concerts we had done.
Inevitably two major pieces of documentation surfaced. A recording engineer in Calgary had a duet recording of Kondo and I, he couldn’t figure out where it had come from until we realized local guitarist Randy Hutton had taped the show on his reel to reel while on a visit to NYC. In drummer David Licht’s stash of cassette tapes was the complete show from the Niteshade Café in Greensboro—my first complete show in Greensboro and the first show I ever did with Licht. The original plan called for two shows in two venues, across the street from each other, on Tate Street. The first night, the Belstone Fox venue fired us after 20 minutes.
The reception the next night was much better, raucous even. It planted the idea in my head that Greensboro would be a good home ground for performing strange creative music, which turned out to be a good hunch.
I combined the music from the NYC and Greensboro shows plus a trio jam with Steve Beresford from Studio Henry in NYC for the double CD entitled Where is Kondo?, the title coming from the difficulties of contacting him, the joke was whatever set of coordinates one was provided with would not work.