Invited onto Tokyo’s jazz circuit, he sat in on “incredibly moving” gigs with John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones in 1979 and ’81. (Shimizu’s bebop phrasings can be heard in “L’Automne à Pékin,” his electronic revamp of the American songbook, from 1983.) He also formed lifelong partnerships with Sakamoto (who died in 2023) and with touring regulars like the bassist Bill Laswell, who enlisted Shimizu into often raucous free improv sessions at the Shinjuku Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz club. “He has a voice,” Laswell said in a phone interview.
In Japan, the cello suites made Shimizu’s reputation. The American composer Carl Stone heard them in the shopping center by his Tokyo home, “literally every day,” he said in a phone interview. When they finally collaborated, Stone would manipulate the microphoned horn through electronics, then reamplify it back to the saxophonist, prompting Shimizu’s colorful “duo with himself,” Stone said.
For the present tour, too, Shimizu will bring only one collaborator, Ray Kunimoto, 33, who will send his saxophone input through a cockpit of electronics, in real time, interweaving the live acoustic performance with beds of Shimizu’s looped sound. They will play from Shimizu’s compositions and some Bach.
This sound-on-sound method, with its exaggerated acoustic decays messing with how the duration of a piece is perceived, is a staple of his early electroacoustic work, especially “Kakashi” and “Music for Commercials” (1987), a buoyant, propulsive suite of micro-compositions he created as jingles for Bridgestone, Seiko and other advertisers. Shimizu likened their recording to haiku, pulling from his synthesizer “collages of sounds and meanings.” (For that work, Daniel Lopatin, an electronic producer known as Oneohtrix Point Never, called Shimizu “a postmodern Bach” in an email.)
Both albums are part of a wave of recent reissues. Jacob Gorchov of Palto Flats, the label that has released “Kakashi” and an album by Shimizu’s band Mariah, said “the turning point for Japanese reissues was around 2015, 2017,” when licenses became more accessible in America and “the floodgates opened.” He added: “Before then, there just wasn’t enough household recognition, not just for Yasuaki but for most Japanese artists.”
As a composer, Shimizu could be said to share the goal of ambient music: to behold time, rather than shape its passage. In our email correspondence, though, he seemed more playful, even adventurous, with the heady ideas he tackles. “If one were to step outside the linear flow of time,” Shimizu asked, “where would the mind find itself?”
