Well, dear reader, that Andy Akiho is at it again.

“Sheesh,” I hear you saying, “what’s he gone and done now? More giant bronze heads? More polymeters and beautiful melodies? Another concerto or two? Another couple of album releases?” No bronze heads this time, but otherwise correct on all counts. How’d you know?

Today we want to talk about three things going down in the Akihoverse: since last we chatted with the polymorphous polymath, he’s released two albums and composed a cello concerto (Nisei) for former Kronos Quartet member Jeffrey Zeigler. The albums you can hear on Bandcamp right here and right here; the latter you can hear live and in person when Zeigler and Oregon Symphony perform it at The Schnitz in Downtown Portland on October 5-7.

Also on the bill at the OSO shows is Akiho’s first concerto–his first overall and also his first for steel pans and orchestra, a one-movement work composed at Yale way before the heftier Beneath Lighted Coffers (which he performed with OSO last year). Here’s the composer performing that exuberant and youthful work in 2011:

The two albums are, as usual, collaborations. The first is BeLonging, a thirty-minute work composed for Imani Winds, whom you surely recall from their varied and vivid Chamber Music Northwest appearances and from us talking about them all the time.

This one alternates solo steel pan movements with movements composed for the wind quintet (to be performed with or without the composer and his pans). Bracketing all that, spoken word movements highlight the work’s extra-musical meaning: it was conceived amidst the winter 2019 power outage at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. Here’s what the album liner notes say about that:

It has to be for something. This all has to be for something! But how can we make it mean something?

Be Loud!
Be Loved!
Be Longing!

This piece is born of protest. But our protest has to be beautiful. This protest is a declaration that is meant to bring people together.

Be Loud!
Be Loved!
Be Longing!

How can we highlight, empower, and uplift people who have been incarcerated? People who have been detained? Folks who have been disenfranchised?

Be Loud!
Be Loved!
Be Longing!

In 2019, Andy Akiho and Imani Winds were searching for inspiration for our collaboration. When we heard the sounds of immigrants held at a Brooklyn detention center, we knew we’d found our reason. Nearly five years later, this album is the result: a series of super-tight, highly choreographed movements for wind quintet and steel pan that speak to the universality of humanity, even — especially — when that humanity is bound.

Sponsor

Akiho is less known for his wind writing than his music for strings and percussion, but his wind writing is fantastic (it doesn’t hurt to have a world-class band like the Imanis on board). Rich, dense, busy and layered and beautiful. Check out the whole thing here:

The other album released this year, Kin, is equally about friendship and collaboration. Here’s what percussionist and longtime Akiho pal Ian Rosenbaum has to say about it:

This collection is about a friendship that was born in fall 2009. Andy and I were in a class together in graduate school, and afterwards, he walked up to me and said, “I play the steel pan. I’m playing a gig at Miso’s tonight, and you should come.” I did go – and my jaw hit the floor after hearing Andy play for 5 minutes. He redefined my definition of what the steel pan could do. After the performance, I went up to him, and asked what music he had that I could play. He didn’t have anything for steel pan and percussion, so we started to arrange some of his existing music for the two of us. We’ve worked on many projects together over the years, but we always find our way back to this duo. This collection contains pieces old and new – many originally written for different instrumental combinations than ours. Our arrangements are a re-imagining of these pieces.

This album is also about one other person – Sean Dixon. Sean and Andy have worked together for more than 20 years. I first got to know him as a drummer, and then as an engineer and producer when he joined us to create Seven Pillars. In 2018, our good friend Jakob Bokulich invited the three of us to play an impromptu performance at the Foley Gallery in NYC. We had all played together in all kinds of contexts, but never as a trio. We didn’t rehearse, we just sketched out a structure and dove in. It was a magical set – and even if we didn’t realize it then, that evening was the starting place for this album.

You’ve surely heard Rosenbaum before: most of us here in Oregon first heard Akiho’s music at Rosenbaum’s CMNW performances, and he’s been back several times (performing the finally-completed LIgNEouS with Dover Quartet in 2018, performing Seven Pillars with his quartet Sandbox Percussion in 2022, and so on). That other guy, though, Sean Dixon. You’ve heard his work as engineer on previous Akiho albums, notably the superbly-engineered Sculptures from last year. What you probably didn’t know is that he’s also a stellar drummer.

The present author had several delightfully startled moments listening to Kin, when familiar Akiho tunes like “Karakurenai” and “21” suddenly acquired these snappy backbeats, as if Stefon Harris had casually dropped by for coffee. It seemed appropriate–reverent, even–to let my jaw drop to the floor and shout, in idiomatic Brooklynese, “Jesus Mary and Joseph this fuckin’ guy!” 

Sponsor

We caught up with Akiho (chilling in Central Park) via Zoom last week and chatted about rhythm, melody, texture, sushi, life, the universe, and everything. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and flow.

***

Oregon ArtsWatch: How did you meet Jeff Zeigler? How did this concerto come about; after knowing each other for so long, what made now the right time to do this?

Andy Akiho: I met Jeff through his awesome wife, Paola Prestini. They’ve become really good friends of mine, especially in New York. She’s the visionary that brought us together, she knew we would be a good pair for projects, and we started a band together at one point with spoken word, cello, steel pans and eventually drums. That became one of our major projects for the past 10 years or so. We’re not doing that anymore, but while we were doing that, we were doing a lot of my old pieces and arranging them for that band.

Jeff and I had always talked about doing a cello concerto when we were doing that. And we were like, that’d be a dream if we got to work together on a large scale piece like that one day. Because we had just been doing quartet stuff. We’d done other collaborations, too, with dancers, and a lot of the stuff we did was through National Sawdust here in New York.

It’s been an awesome journey working with Jeff, he’s inspired me a lot through the years, and it’s been a cool journey. We had this opportunity to meet Alasdair [Neale], the director at Sun Valley Music Festival, for dinner back in February 2018 at a Chinese New Year’s concert when New York Philharmonic played my Ping Pong Concerto, and Jeff and Alasdair came out for that. Alasdair was really interested in getting it going and having this as a consortium, and on my home turf. The Oregon Symphony have the West Coast premiere and we’re going to record it, too. It was nice to put this thing together after so many years of dreaming of it. Sometimes these things take a minute, especially when there’s a pandemic in between.

OAW: Could talk about the “Nisei” aspect of this music? It sounds like that came out gradually and organically, as opposed to “we’re going to call it this and compose around that.”

Sponsor

AA: Most of what I do is organic, and I usually name the piece after it’s already done and they need the name for the program notes. But honestly from the start, we were like, hey man, why don’t we make this about our roots a little bit too? That’s the starting point for inspiration. Not that I’m very literal in trying to do things, even though there are some aspects that are probably inspired by Japanese culture. We’re both half Japanese, and we’re both Nisei. Second generation Japanese in the US. There’s a lot of history with that term. It is just the literal meaning of being second generation. That’s why I spelled it with one “s.” I feel like the historical thing is found with two “s”s and that felt more like the internment camps and everything during World War II–and this has nothing to do with that, I just want to be clear about that. It’s just literally about us. I mean speaking for myself, getting more involved in my Japanese roots later in life. And I thought it was interesting that both Jeff and I have roots in South Carolina. I grew up in South Carolina and I believe his Dad’s from South Carolina, so he’s got family there and then we’re both half Japanese, which is interesting. I was like, let’s make that the start of inspiration for this piece.

OAW: You mentioned getting in touch with your roots later in life. Was there anything that set that off for you? And what’s that been like?

AA: Yeah, moving to New York and being in touch with my Dad. And I became a sushi chef when I was about twenty-six. This is in 2006, and it was a pretty historical point in my personal life. It was the first time I ever had a real job that I had to go to every day, and it was when I was really getting in touch with my Japanese family and roots. And it opened my mind up to all my first compositions, because I would go home from sushi and write these color pieces that had Japanese titles, and I’m still doing those pieces to this day. That’s what really got me going in composition. So a lot of my roots of becoming and identifying as a composer comes from me getting in touch with my Japanese roots later in life. That’s why I didn’t start composing until really late in life.

OAW: This concerto is for “cello and chamber orchestra.” Could you talk about that scoring, and how it fits with the idea of doing something simultaneously new and traditional?

AA: The orchestra is just strings, winds, and brass. There’s no percussion, there’s no timpani, and I purposely wanted to do that to challenge myself to do something new with this and have that more Classical sized orchestra. The woodwinds are in twos, brass are in twos. There’s still tuba, and it felt right; I wanted tuba in there. It’s a full orchestra, but it’s not full epic orchestra, with all percussion and piano and harp. There’s not even harp, and I usually write for a lot of harp and orchestra. So there’s nothing really percussive, except for when I do Bartók pizz or something. I really tried to focus a lot on counterpoint and harmony on this. I thought more of the lines, because I usually start from a lot of timbre. I’m always thinking color and timbre. But I really focused on the harmonic lines and the melodies on this.

OAW: Was there anything in composing this that particularly surprised you as you were composing? Did the music take you anywhere you didn’t think you were going?

AA: Every piece does that because I don’t know where I’m going, I just start. And I get lost in the woods, but I like to live life like that anyways, I don’t like to know where I’m going. Even when I go to a new city. For example, in the second movement, I was starting to feel like these rooted early Baroque vibes. I was feeling it a certain way and then I started writing the cello line, and it was completely out of the way I was feeling it. So I literally wrote the same music and changed the meter. I changed it from compound time to duple. So it was in 9, 12, 6, 8 that kind of vibe, and I switched it all to 3/4. That way the cello line could sound like it was just floating. I still hear it in the old compound meter. I’m nodding like this, how I hear it and how the feel of the strings and the meter feels to me. But it’s actually a different feel. It works better for the soloist to do that, and for the audience, and even from my own perspective it just feels like the cello is truly floating over that. And that was fun to mess with, that soaring line.

Sponsor

This was a challenging piece for me, and I’m still learning from it. It’s still a journey for me. I feel like we just started it, you know? We’re recording it, which is crazy. I feel like this piece is just starting out. It’s just starting now. The writing was just the roots of it, and now it’s growing. Now we get to see the tree grow. And what Jeff does with it–he’s making it his own, he really is internalizing it. And I think different cellists will do different things with it. But I wrote it specifically with Jeff in mind, picturing him doing every note. But it’d be nice to hear how other people interpret, too. I think he’s excited about that too, and the piece is open enough to have that kind of interpretation. Even though I’m pretty specific in the way I write things, I still think it’s open to a lot of personality.

I’m just curious to know how the audience is gonna feel with it. I can’t wait. I’ve liked the journey so far, and I’m just getting to know the piece myself. I think all composers, as you know, we’re writing up to the last second. By the time I finished it I almost forgot what I was working on, because it was just so intense. And then I got to go to the premiere in Sun Valley and hear it there at an outdoor venue. They did an amazing job there, and it’s going to be nice to hear it in The Schnitz and get a different perspective in an indoor venue. And I’m excited that the home turf audience is gonna experience that with me, so I hope we pack it, I hope we get people there, and I’m curious to know what different audiences feel about it.

OAW: You’re also playing your first steel pan concerto on this concert. Not Beneath Lighted Coffers but the earlier one. What’s that like?

AA: Yeah, this is the old one. This is my very first orchestra piece. I still hear it and feel like it’s a student piece, because it was my first orchestra piece and I mean student in terms of just learning as I’m doing it. The trial by fire. “I need to write an orchestral piece, let me write it from the steel pan, because that’s the instrument I know best, and let’s turn into a concerto.” So that’s what I did with that one, and I always meant for it to have two more movements, so to me it still feels like a one movement piece that was supposed to be a first movement. It feels like an unfinished piece to me.

OAW: The unfinished concerto.

AA: Yeah, but we’re recording it like it’s the final thing. Well, you know, I don’t want to live in the past, so I know my intentions were always to write two more movements but that’s why I think I ended up writing Beneath Lighted Coffers. I was in a different place in my life, so it is what it is. It’s a one movement steel pan concerto. It’s just called–it’s a pretty vanilla title–Concerto for steel pans and orchestra. I also wanted to just have that traditional title, but with the steel pan. The newness of having the pan in these Classical situations. I know it’s been done before, but also I wanted to present my voice with this and I want to write more. I want to write more cello concertos, I want to write more steel pan concertos. So we’ll see how that goes.

OAW: Could you talk a little bit about the composition process? With it being a student piece, what were you soaking up at the time? What were you listening to and studying? What were you thinking about and what were you trying to do?

Sponsor

AA: I was studying everything. So the setup is really two instruments in one. It’s this pair of double seconds, which is the alto range and a tenor pan, which is really a soprano range. And so it extends it from a low E below middle C, up about three octaves, so it goes about to the high E above the treble staff. And the pan I normally play on normally goes from middle C, so it’s kind of like a flute range minus an octave. It starts on that C almost more like an oboe range. So this gives me an extended range, and the reason I started setting it up like that was so I could do the Bach sonatas and partitas. So when I was working on Bach, I just kept that same arrangement, the soprano pan in the middle with the left alto pan on the left of that, and the right alto pan on the right of that. I split up the alto instrument by putting the soprano instrument in the middle, and then just started writing for that. I did that first with a string quartet and steel pan piece called I falleN TwO. And then I did it again with this concerto. So that’s where I was at that time.

AA: Now I try not to do that, because of logistics. Flying with all that is hard, because I have to fly with three steel pans plus a suitcase holding the stand. So that’s four checked bags. Logistically this piece is nonsense, because it’s all that for a ten or eleven minute piece. Beneath Lighted Coffers is just one steel pan with that range, but it’s a 35 minute piece so you’re getting to travel with it more. But when you’re young, you try to do everything all in one piece and try to use as many instruments as possible. I just wanted to go big or go home at that point. And I like the range, I like the warmth of the lower range. I’ve still got to learn it.

OAW: So is Present Akiho cursing Past Akiho, like “why did you do this to me?”

AA: It’s not a hard piece to learn. I wrote Beneath Lighted Coffers for a steel pan virtuoso, Liam Teague. When I was learning that one I was like, “Oh my God! I feel like I’m learning so many notes!” This one’s a little bit easier to learn–but logistically I’m like, man, why did I write for three pans? At least in Portland it’s easy, I just go from my house, it’s only a mile away. I’m coming back around to enjoying hearing it, and not dissing it so much. I mean, it’s where I was at that point in my life so it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s fun. I think it’s energetic. It’s completely different than Nisei. I think Nisei is more mature, not that that’s better or worse, but it’s just a different place. So this concert is interesting because it’s my very first orchestra piece and my most recent, and hopefully not last, orchestra piece. So you’re getting the bookends of my life so far, as a composer.

OAW: Let’s talk a little bit about the two albums that have come out since the last time we talked. The Imani one came out this summer, and then this one that just came out last month with Ian and Sean.

AA: Yeah, thanks. I hope you get a chance to check that out if you haven’t yet.

OAW: I listened to it all day today.

Sponsor

AA: Oh, thank you so much. Well, the Imani Winds album came out first, and that’s really featuring their musical virtuosities and expression. They’re a phenomenal group to work with. I wrote this piece for them back in 2022 for a premiere in New York, and then I expanded it for the album. I expanded the steel pan movement especially, and then I bookended it with some electronic stuff with them speaking about our experiences going out to Rikers and working with some of the cats there at Rikers, some of them incarcerated there. And it was cool being able to work with them and getting to know them a little bit through drumming. We actually premiered the piece, a little section of the piece, for them there. And so the piece is about that type of life and the hardships of that life from the little we know about it, and their experiences. It was going to be a piece that they would hopefully be able to perform in detention centers and have concerts in addition to the concert hall. And so this album is reflecting that.

It’s three big movements–”BeLoud,” “BeLoved,” and “BeLonging”–and the whole album is called BeLonging, and those are the pieces that feature the wind quintet and myself. And then there’s two pan interludes in between those, and it’s bookended with these collages. Some are news reporters reporting about when all the power went out at the Brooklyn Detention Center back in 2019, and it was during the winter and all these people were protesting and they were drumming and that sparked our initial ideas for the piece. And in the end I had to talk to Imani, all the members one-on-one, and recorded it, and tried to make this collage talking about our experiences there and about this piece, and it’s an abstract collage about it. I’m really happy with that album. It’s exactly thirty minutes, and there’s a lot of notes in there but also a lot of emotions in there too. It’s a lot to take in, but I encourage people to listen to it and listen to it as a full story.

I’d never written a solo like that either, “Longing.” I wrote that back in March, and I wrote it as I was recording it, so I’ve gotta write it down one day. I’d write, I’d improvise a section, I’d record it and then I’d improvise another section and put it together, and it became this long process. It felt very organic to do that. They can do it with or without me, so they can do the three big movements, and they’ve been touring with that for a year and a half already. A version just for the quintet and then when I’m available to do it, we can do it as a sextet. But their music doesn’t change at all, it’s either with or without pan. And there’s a little bit of improvisation in it for the pan. I just really tried to write for their personalities too. Like Toyin has this miracle soaring line in “BeLoved,” and I gave Mark this crazy solo in “BeLonging,” and he plays it so well, and then I repeated it, and the second time I had everybody else hyping him up. Like the height with the harmonies and stuff, just trying to make something exciting, you know, with Monica giving her some fun basslines with the bassoon. You know that low end, I love working with that. But all the players are phenomenal. Brandon and Kevin, getting to know them more–I didn’t know them as much, because they were the newer members–and being able to write them some crazy stuff, too.

AA: The other album is called Kin. We were struggling with that title a little bit, but I think that’s the right title, because they’re like family to me, Ian and Sean, I’ve been working with them for so long. And it’s also the Japanese word for gold. That’s also the newest piece on that album. That’s essentially the only piece that hasn’t been recorded in some other form before. Part of this album was gonna be like an MTV Unplugged version of a lot of my older pieces. But then we were working with Sean, he was engineering and he was like, “man, we should put some drums on.” And I was like, “yeah, let’s hear it.” And we loved it. I like hearing them with the drums, so we’ll keep drums in on those tracks. So that’s how it became that–it was just gonna be duo the whole album. So it was nice that we got to feature Sean on a lot of that stuff.

I’ve released a lot of those pieces, especially on the NO one To kNOW one album. But that was different, it was more like chamber, or a fusion jazz combo, or something. This is more like an intimate version for trio or duo. It’s nice, we put those arrangements together. It’s all the same music, but we got the multitracks and different harmonies, that kind of thing, especially with the marimba. We extended a lot of the harmonies, and Ian’s playing a lot of the parts. Sometimes he’ll be playing the flute part, and the cello part, and the bass part.

Sean’s got a nice sound, his timbres, and his pocket, right? I’ve been working with Sean since December 2003. He was one of the first musicians I worked with when I moved to New York. We had a band together right when I moved to New York. And we’ve been working together ever since, and he’s been the main engineer for our label, too. We started with Seven Pillars, he engineered that and then every album since basically. It was cool to have him rock some drums. He was also in the band I was in with Jeff, so there’s a lot of that crossover too. A lot of these pieces are similar to what we were doing with that, too.

OAW: Okay, same last question I always ask: what would you ask Andy Akiho?

Sponsor

AA: I think I’ve already been asking myself this so much: “How do I want to balance my life and do the projects I want to do in the next five, ten years? Like what’s the next chapter?” Basically that’s the answer I’m searching for. I want to go bigger. I want to do bigger things. I want to do projects that I’m initiating even more. But I wanna live a more balanced life. So I’m not dead in a year. So that I can do this for the next ten, twenty, whatever. However long I can live to do this and try not to burn out as much. I’ve been going so nonstop and I just don’t want to ever lose quality because of that. I wanna get better, I wanna do bigger projects, and I want to grow artistically. So I’m always asking myself that every day, how can I mold this life into the next chapter? Because I don’t wanna redo the same things. Everything I want to do I want it to be new and a new adventure and something that I could easily fail at, too, because it is so new and treacherous sometimes. But I’d rather do that than do something that’s comfortable and that I’ve already done before.

OAW: How do you find the balance in that? To have the new but then have the balance in your life?

AA: It’s not balanced right now, yet, but I’m hopeful for that journey. It’s getting a little more balanced, even living in Portland for a while now. And trying to live a healthier life a little bit. I still haven’t figured out how to sleep. But at least I started running a little bit. I want to take on less, but do more with it. Still haven’t figured that out yet and it’s hard to say no to certain things. I say no to most things but still I always underestimate by a factor of sixteen how long things are gonna take me.

If I think something’s gonna take a day it’s gonna take half a month. And I’m like sure of it, I’m like, “oh I can knock that out in a day, like quick.” And then next thing I know, it’s sixteen days later, and I’m still working on it. So if I think a composition is gonna take a month, it’s probably gonna take sixteen months.

OAW: So if something’s gonna take you a year, we’ll see you in 2040.

AA: Exactly. But the other side of that is, I’m so imbalanced that I’ll fit sixteen years into a year. That’s the other side. So that’s why that’s where I lose the sleep. You see what I’m saying? And that’s when I fall off the map, and nobody knows where I am, or if I’m alive, and everybody’s mad at me because I’m out of touch or I’m not doing something I’m supposed to do. I’m working so hard on the project that I can’t think about anything else. I’m just so tunnel vision when I get in there. One day, balance.