And now some jazz… *Quietly watches all my readers’ eyes glaze over*. For those who can appreciate the bigger “jazz” picture, here’s Hiroki Miyano’s D / I/ V /E /R /G /E. Showcasing Hiroki Miyano’s wonderfully elegant guitar playing, D / I/ V /E /R /G /E takes great pains not to rock the boat as would be expected. Although I believe you can share any album I write about with your family, some are too “difficult” to.
D / I/ V /E /R /G /E isn’t one of these albums. It’s pleasant. It’s mannered. It’s at ease with itself. It’s a surprisingly complex album of Japanese New Age fusion that you can leave on the background and quickly become absorbed with. It grows its ambiance not through mere ambient touchstones but through languid phrasing — it’s one of those jazz albums made for those silent ways (anyone can understand).
Hiroki’s own creative life began in Sapporo. As noted elsewhere on the web, Hiroki grew up collecting jazz records of early personal music idols like John McLaughlin and Django Reinhardt. By the age of 10, Hiroki had already bought a guitar and in short time began taking his first steps to play out around Tokyo’s storied jazz clubs.
Somehow, in 1981, the noted editor of J-Jazz magazine Swing Journal clued in one Teo Macero (of Miles Davis fame) to the stylings of this young upstart. Shortly, Hiroki was signed to a contract with huge Japanese label Phillips and was sent out to NYC to record an album of originals with Teo functioning as producer. Working with truly gifted/prolific jazz session cats like Marcus Miller, Buddy Williams, and Ryo Kawasaki, they’d use his debut album (Manhattan Skyline) to launch off his career.
Back then on albums like it and sophomore release, Full Sail, Hiroki was given to following into the flashy fusion trappings that other jazz bofo guitarists would fall in. On his final album with Teo, 1983’s Super Guitar Duo (a collaboration album with iconic smooth jazz guitarist Earl Klugh), one could sense his restlessness to take things a bit simpler. Interest in world music, and things decidedly less “jazzy”, were gnawing at him. Once back in Japan, he’d start to trek a different path.
First began Hiroki’s creation of a group he’d dub “Acoustic Club”, a quiet way, to supplement the wilder ways of another group he created, dubbed “Right Staff” for the hard fusion fans. Formed with fellow friends Febian Reza Pane, Yasuharu Nakanishi, and Tomohiro Yahiro, Acoustic Club would serve as a floating quintet that could explore all these other kinds of music outside of the jazz world. Showing influences of New Age, Africa, neoclassical, and other quiet/minimal worlds, from 1986 to their end, Acoustic Club allowed Hiroki to step away from the spotlight and layback into grooves where the band was the star.
In 1988, Hiroki would complete his transformation from mere jazz guitarist into a more quicksilver character. You’ve already heard his wonderfully inbetween contributions to Lyu Hong-Jun’s work, one that capped off what was Misawa Home’s environmental music series in a way that spoke of “acoustic” music’s own ability to play that role. D / I/ V /E /R /G /E applies that same idea of aesthetics and environmental space to what was his original love: jazz.
Jazz aficionados, you probably know these by heart: Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady”, Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From The Apple”, Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage”. These are just a few of the standards Hiroki tweaks in surprising ways, in quiet ways, to fit more intimate environs. Entirely self-released on his on Deep Moat label, Hiroki understood this album albeit a “jazz” album had that same quicksilver-like ambient touch of Coltrane, Miles, at their most reflective. This was a point of divergence from where his, now countless, young J-Jazz guitar fans expected.
One youngish upstart, Yann Tomita, was invited to complement the crew of Febian Reza Pane, Soichi Noriki and Kenji Sakasegawa, to create an original like “Miroku” that spoke of ways J-Jazz can still move forward. Mixing percussive-driven tropical lanquidity with open-aire saudade-ness, they come together to affirm that different stews, with different ingredients, don’t always create knocking flavors.
Sometimes the greatest stock comes from the remnants of things we’re just fitting to throw out.