Dear readers, today I want to introduce you to this album <Goro Ito, Paula Morelenbaum & Jaques Morelenbaum – Tree, Forests Tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto> and the musician Goro Ito.
Composer, bossa nova guitarist, and producer Goro Ito has announced a new tribute album celebrating the music of his close friend Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Co-led with renowned cellist Jaques Morelenbaum and vocalist Paula Morelenbaum, the album reimagines works from across Sakamoto’s career, alongside a classic by Antonio Carlos Jobim and a new original piece, Fragmentos, written by Ito and Paula Morelenbaum.
The recording features contributions from Aya Ito, Koichi Sato, Keita Ogawa, and Mami Kakudo, with Haruomi Hosono joining on bass for Happy End – a song famously covered by Yellow Magic Orchestra.
As a bonus, the album includes Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (re-modeled by Goro Ito), originally released in 2010.
Goro Ito became one of the truly few people in Japanese jazz who can be called composers in jazz. He will be able to create his own repertoire, almost completely abandoning the themes of popular songs and musicals, Bossa nova, guitar player …
I first encountered Ryuichi Sakamoto six years after he had collaborated with Jaques and Paula Morelenbaum on CASA (2001), their tribute album to Antonio Carlos Jobim. When I first listened to CASA, I was struck by how much common ground and closeness there was between Sakamoto’s music and Jobim’s — to the point that it felt as though it could almost be called Sakamoto’s own work. When played on his piano, I sometimes couldn’t tell whether a piece was by Jobim or Sakamoto. As someone who had been exploring bossa nova as an approach to Jobim’s music, I almost felt a sense of rivalry — in a good way — because the album illuminated a path I wanted to follow. Six years after the release of CASA, I met Sakamoto in person and had the privilege of working with him. Under his label, commmons, we co-produced thirteen albums together. It was also through him that I was introduced to Jaques and Paula. Sadly, Sakamoto passed away in 2023, but thanks to Paula’s initiative, we held a tribute tour for him in Japan and Korea. It became a tour in which everyone performed his compositions with deep respect. Wanting to preserve that emotion, I decided to create this album. Arranging and performing Sakamoto’s music was something truly special for me. It was both a way of studying his work and a joyful process of discovering traces of A.C. Jobim and other timeless classical composers within his compositions. Creating this album with such wonderful musicians, and now having the opportunity to speak about it in this interview, is a profound joy for me,- an interview with as said Goro Ito.
After all, in jazz it is not enough to just come up with a theme to be considered a composer – you need to be like an academic composer and achieve unity of form and content, tie them with improvisations. It is not for nothing that many serious jazz musicians were so attentive to academic music … studied it in order to use its principles in jazz.
Goro Ito’s works have greatly expanded the aesthetic boundaries of jazz, introducing new means of expression into it. He managed to “graft” some academic features onto jazz and bossa nova without distorting the structure of the genre; everything sounds very natural and harmonious with him. It can be said that Goro Ito has summed up the artistic results of attempts to combine the art of composition and improvisation in jazz.
In general, we hope, that Goro Ito is a figure that is greatly underestimated in his home country. We recommend that you own this CD and enjoy it.
By Olivia Peevas
