Shoji Hano & Olaf Rupp

Olaf Rupp and Shoji Hano met for the fist time on their concert at the MOERS FESTIVAL in 2007 and have played several tours together since then. Both of them see their musical roots outside of traditional Jazz: Shoji Hano started with Taiko drumming, a traditional Japanese form of big wooden drums. Olaf Rupp never played Jazz but started with experimental Rock music and Free Improvisation. They both see this unrootedness less as a genre-problem but rather as a chance for musical freedom.

 

Olaf Rupp started at the age of twelve as an autodidact to play what might be called today Improvised Music. His way of holding the guitar in an upright position is inspired by chinese Pipa players. He developped some playing techniques like for instance rasgueados, arpeggios, picados and tremolos in such a way that they can be used for overtone and cluster effects to create new, "virtual" sounds. Lacking the "extatic" part of FreeJazz as well as the pure mechanical emphasis of Nancarrow he sometimes describes his sounds as "analog granular synthesis". He played among others with Lol Coxhill, Michael Wertmüller, John Zorn, Joe Williamson, Paul Lovens, Thomas Lehn, Butch Morris und Tony Buck. Four solo albums on FMP and GROB.

 

LINKS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSOLnc5xJVk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbmcxmifZA&feature=related

 
Shoji Hano was born March 1, 1955 in Kokura, Fukuoka prefecture, Japan. Hano moved to Kyoto in 1974, and started playing avant-garde jazz with the late pianist Yoshito Osawa in 1975. Around that time Hano met trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, who introduced him to the martial art Shintaido. Since that time, the philosophical concepts of Shintaido have influenced Hano's music. In 1976 Hano, Kondo and Osawa formed a trio, and in 1977 they performed around western Japan on Hano's first tour.
 

Since then Hano played solo and band until 1982, but Hano felt frustrated with the direction of his career, and stopped playing music for two years.

 

When Hano returned to the music scene in 1985 he began to develop his own style, based on the concepts of Shintaido. With Yamauchi and Gotsu he formed the band OPE, which was active from 1986 to 1989, and in '88-'89 he played solo and with dancers in a bimonthly concert series he had organized called Shintaido Performance and Drums. Hano recorded his solo performances from the 1988 series, and these recordings were released the following year as a tape called KI-Improvisation. In May 1990 Hano left Japan for the first time, to play in Europe.

 

In 1997 Hano was a member of the rock-oriented trio Joichiza, with Hananojo Ichikawa (vocal and guitar) and Masaharu Shoji (sax), which played that year in the Kansai area. In the same year, he launched a new project: a free jazz band called Dai So-on Gakudan (meaning "very noisy band"). The original members were Hano and four sax players, and pianist Takeshi Shibuya later joined the group. The saxplayers are Hiroaki Katayama (tenor), Keizo Nobori(tenor), Masaharu Shoji (alto) and Kunihiro Izumi (alto). In 1998 Hano joined the psychedelic rock band High Rise; the other members are Munehiro Narita (guitar) and Asahito Nanjo (bass, vocal). The band (including Hano) toured in the U.S., England and France in October and November, '98.

 

LINKS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVUc0DpPb94&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnPqf_nAZTI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nruk-xyULs&feature=related

 

Admission: £8 adv / £10 on the door