Koto player Michiyo Yagi is a national treasure like no other. Why she isn¡¯t the most famous musician in all of Japan blows my feeble mind.
She¡¯s a Japanese woman playing the koto ¡ª the most Japanese of Japanese musical instruments. She¡¯s part of an ancient tradition, yet out on her own: unchained, untouched, unmatched. Every musician that has ever lived likes to spew the same staid ¡°I can¡¯t be pigeonholed¡± line, but Yagi truly lives outside the confines of any genre. She sometimes plays her instrument straight up, making listeners feel nostalgic for a time and country they¡¯ve never known. At other times, she attacks it like Linda Blair double-possessed.
Her free-jazz collaborators have included some of the biggest names in the non-business (John Zorn, Fred Frith, Peter Brotzmann and Elliott Sharp among them). To say she helps keep the koto contemporary would be misleading. She doesn¡¯t keep it contemporary; she travels into the future, digs it dead out of the dusty boneyard, and righteously resurrects it.
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