Genzo

Genzo Okabe: "In the 'Okabe Family' project, including this album, I have been creating music by relying only on my own sensibilities for about 10 years, without being caught up in what is authentic or what is progress. Whether it's real jazz or not, it's not a problem at all from my personal point of view. Create something voluntarily and throw it into a global platform. Then, if someone somewhere in the world reacts in any way, a new movement will come out. I hope that localization will bring artists to make new communities in the sense of musical interest rather than national or geographic framework, and a variety of music as many dialects enrich our entire society."

En la época de las guerras civiles japonesas suceden hechos extraños que tan sólo un avezado marionetista puede resolver. Genzo posee la habilidad de emular seres humanos mediante las marionetas, un arte que pasa de padres a hijos desde incontables generaciones. Una princesa desea vengar a su prometido, que ha sido asesinado. Una misteriosa mujer-monstruo aterroriza las montañas. Un hombre que lleva la máscara de la muerte asola una población… El marionetista no actúa ni por ambición ni por dinero.

En la época de las guerras civiles japonesas suceden hechos extraños que tan sólo un avezado marionetista puede resolver. Genzo posee la habilidad de emular seres humanos mediante las marionetas, un arte que pasa de padres a hijos desde incontables generaciones. Una princesa desea vengar a su prometido, que ha sido asesinado. Una misteriosa mujer-monstruo aterroriza las montañas. Un hombre que lleva la máscara de la muerte asola una población… El marionetista no actúa ni por ambición ni por dinero.

Disoriental is a musical exploration and expression of the complexity of identity. As an expatriate artist who has been living as a minority in different places for most of his lifetime, Okabe attempts to critically approach the versatility and universality of jazz, a genre that absorbs all kinds of external elements to form its shape anew.

Following the publication of Carl Orff's Gisei, CPO now release its sister work: Felix Weingartner's one-act Die Dorfschule (The Village School) a work also based on the plot of Terakoya. Weingartner's masterfully crafted realization of the ancient Japanese drama centring on a village school, can now be contrasted with young Carl Orff's tentative early version.

In 1913, when he was only eighteen years old, Carl Orff finished his first opera, Gisei. This tragic story, featuring the sacrificial death of a child as well as Japanese culture in general, so greatly inspired the young composer that throughout his life he remained fond of Japan. In Japanese tragedy he found numerous similarities to the ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles, with which he constantly engaged himself intensively.

Adulated in his native Japan, drummer Hideo Shiraki led the most famous Japanese jazz group of the early 60’s. His combining jazz and traditional Japanese music brought him an invitation to the 1965 Berlin Jazz Festival and a record date. Three women playing Koto, the traditional Japanese stringed instrument, accompanied the quintet. The results: world music that works.