Satoh Michihiro

Tsugaru-shamisen participant Satoh Michihiro was created in Tokyo. Around age 13, Michihiro’s mom, who also performed, enrolled him inside a college to learn to try out the shamisen. Unusually youthful to get a shamisen college student (nearly all students are in least double that age group) and an easy learner, Michihiro’s improvement triggered tensions at the institution that led to his expulsion a month after enrolling. He had not been interested in learning to be a professional musician therefore enrolled at Tokai College or university in 1975 going to become a dispatch captain. During his junior calendar year, he went to a functionality by tsugaru-shamisen participant Chisato Yamada and was totally changed with the artwork of Yamada’s music. Michihiro made a decision to move to North Japan and research with Yamada, and by 1981 was a instructor himself. The next 2 yrs, he gained the Country wide Tsugaru-Shamisen Competition. The shamisen community was governed with a licensing program for educators of traditional Japanese arts, known as iemoto, and within this technique each performer can be associated with a college to which he’s closely connected not only artistically, but socially and economically. Believing this framework to be restricting to shamisen music’s advancement, Michihiro started playing beyond the shamisen community in 1983, carrying out in jazz, rock and roll and free of charge improvisation configurations. That yr, he remaining Japan for the very first time to execute in Edmonton, Canada. Another eight years discovered him returning abroad annually, frequently for solo shows in NY. In 1984, John Zorn asked Michihiro to record with him, and the next yr, Ganryu Island premiered, with Michihiro coming back touring THE UNITED STATES soon after (it had been reissued by Tzadik in 1998). Back Tokyo that same yr, he began a continuing periodic concert series known as “Tsugaru-Shamisen Right now,” which presented himself collaborating with visitor musicians, such as for example Zorn and Kazutoki Umezu. In 1986, Michihiro was granted a Rockefeller fellowship to review music for just one yr. 1988 discovered him in saving classes with improvisers and best musicians such as for example Fred Frith, Ned Rothenberg, Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, and Gerry Hemingway. These classes became the 1989 launch Rodan. The same yr, he aimed music for the film Tsugaru, then kept six bi-monthly concerts of free of charge improvisation also entitled Rodan. He shaped the Satoh Michihiro Super Music group in 1992, that transformed its name towards the Satoh Michihiro Tsugaru Shamisen Gakudan (Music group) in 1994. They released Natsu Yoi Matsuri in 1995. Also during this time period, he released two CDs of traditional Japanese music.