Amoeba Music

Kaoru Abe - Biography

It’s a point of pride among a certain breed of saxophonists, being the loudest, the most aggressive. From Albert Ayler to Peter Broetzmann to Borbetomagus, musicians have gone to extremes. But an argument can be made that the most abrasive of them all was Japan’s Kaoru Abe (1949-1978). The saxophone has always held a particular and peculiar place in modern music. Unlike its counterparts in the woodwind family, it doesn’t often get a chair in the modern symphony orchestra. Adolphe Sax developed it in 1841, and he wanted it to be (1) versatile and (2) very loud, so for the longest time it was used for martial music, outdoors, as opposed to the rarified confines of the concert hall, next to the delicate piccolo and the odd English horn. Early jazz players recognized that it was the perfect instrument, combining the wide range and versatility of a woodwind with the big, booming sound of a brass instrument. As jazz marched towards modernity, performers started to take advantage of the saxophone’s quirks, exploring techniques like overblowing that put their instrument at the forefront of the avant garde. And as the playing got noisier and noiser, and musicians began jettisoning the cool meters of bop for ecstatic wails, anarchic groans, and atonal shudders, the sax got even more macho. It became a race for intensity, volume and sheer cacophony, and it’s a race that Kaoru Abe won.

Most of Abe’s recordings have been released posthumously. The great Japanese label PSF has addressed much of Abe’s finest and earliest works, and they’re a marvel. Abe could make notes simply pour out of his instrument, in shimmering cascades of sound. Sinjuku captures him in 1970 in an early trio setting, with bass and drums. Jazz Bed is a splendid duo with Yamazaki, also the drummer for the powerful improv guitarist, Masayuki Takayanagi. Mokuyobi No Yoru and Winter 72 are both essential releases. Abe was fearless enough to explore other instrumentation as well, including guitar and – and this defines bravery – harmonica. None of the man’s albums are for the timid, but they merit scrutiny. Studio Sessions 12/03/1976 (2004, 3D Japan), is probably the most readily accessible of his late-era recordings.

Abe lived very hard life, even for a musician, and he didn’t live for very long. He was notorious for his democratic abuse of substances; by all accounts his personal life was equally troubled, starting with his marriage to author Suzuki Izumi. What’s sad about the shooting star that was Abe’s life, was that if he had lived for another decade, he would have been treated like royalty when the free-improv genre finally broke in the 1990s. As it stands, we’re left with spectacularly innovating and daring recordings of his singularly intense, titanic sound, a sound that continues to exert influence on subsequent generations of young musicians. Adolphe Sax probably wouldn’t have known what to think of of Kaoru Abe – most of Abe’s contemporaries were equally puzzled. But it’s fair to say that if Sax wanted the sound of his instrument to be loud, Abe was happy to oblige.