Pianist Motoko Honda is the walking definition of the phrase “sound sculpturist.” She stands as much as she sits during her performances: either to direct her ensembles with a sweep of the hand or stabbing point of a finger, or to just lean into her open piano to perform some sort of bewitching skullduggery on its prepared strings—all the while working her (bare) foot pedals to create loops of electronic squiggles and sighs. Not content to simply compose and make music, Honda, in the sage words of Greg Burk, “colors the air.”
Like her colleagues in L.A.’s creative-improvisational community with whom she’s played—quite a a few, like Vinny Golia, our fearless leader Jeff Gauthier, Steuart Liebig, April Guthries, Alex Cline, Emily Hay, Ben Wendel, Joe Berardi, Kris Tiner, Andrea Centazzo, Ivan Johnson, Jesse Gilbert, Fumiko Amano and Carole Kim, are from the Crypto extended family—Honda marries classical, jazz, avant-garde, Pacific-Rim textures and 21st century technology into musical soundscapes that reflect Obamanian visions of a seamless mix-and-match between colliding world cultures.
(To underscore this point: she’s from Yokohama, Japan by way of Lindsborg, Kansas.)
Motoko Honda with Crypto founder Jeff Gauthier and unidentified diner
A student of far-out trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and percussionist Dean Kranzler, Ms. Honda refers to her “holistic” musical approach as one that’s intended “to affect the skin, organs and minds of the listener instead of simply being heard as rhythmic and harmonic themes.” As much performance art or a living art installation, an evening with Motoko offers no boundaries on where or when the music begins and ends. She also incorporates tenets of avant-garde composers like Terry Riley and John Cage in using the very spaces and environments of performance—the creaks and shifts of concert-hall walls, the abrupt coughs and muffled ringtones that comes from the audience, the sirens of the city outside—as instruments in themselves.
At last year's inaugural Angel City Jazz Festival, Honda debuted her ambition to a rapt crowd: a 13-part suite "Images of Los Angeles" that was as dynamic and unpredictable as the city we've all grown to...uh, respect. For this year's programme, the artist continues her dance with chance and composition--literally, a duet between her and butoh frieze-master Oguri
"Oguri and I are going to perform a collaboration work "Memories and Seasons." It is not final and we are still working on the internal structure. During this August we are planning a field trip to the Ford Amphitheatre itself, so we can incorporate and reflect the theater's atmosphere and structures into our conception of music and dance. I'm most likely to use Prepared Electro-Acoustic Piano (I use electronics, but all generated by piano itself, preparation is mostly done inside of the piano), and use the advantages of being outside, taking the ideas from the sound of nature and it's surroundings."
Go here for concert review of Wadada Leo Smith/Motoko Honda/Oguri performance (10/20/07)
Go here for the trailer from Good Ear: A Documentary About Creative Jazz (featuring Motoko Honda).
UPDATE: Next week (Aug. 17-18), the Sundance Channel be running Height of Sky, filmmaker Morleigh Steinberg's documentary about Oguri. Go here for broadcast times.
Go here for a dance review of Oguri/Carol Kim/Dan Clucas/Alex Cline’s NOW Festival Performance at REDCAT (7/31/09).
Video for “The Way” by Mia Doi Todd featuring Oguri
Motoko Honda & Joe Berardi at ResBox, Los Angeles (8/21/08)
Krispen Hartung, Emily Hay & Motoko Honda at the Boise Experimental Music Festival (5/30/08)
Motoko Honda live at UndergroundDNUOS, Los Angeles (2008)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR:
Motoko Honda and Oguri's Angel City Jazz Festival performance will be Monday, Sept. 7, 2009 at 9:15pm. Catch her this coming Saturday, Aug. 8, with Steuart Liebig and Joe Berardi at Cafe Metropol.
