Izumi Kimura: Translating The World Into Music

Music may not be the most important thing in the world, not with all the turmoil that is going on, but it would be hard to envisage life without it.

At the very least music can be a balm in stormy times, a distraction from the madness. Plenty of philosophers have waxed lyrical about the importance of music, but perhaps Jack Kerouac was closest to the mark when he wrote 'The only truth is music.'

For professional musicians, making music can be a way of making sense of the world around them, of voicing 'that which cannot be put into words, and which cannot remain silent,' as Victor Hugo so eloquently put it.

For Japanese-born pianist and composer Izumi Kimura, a leading figure on the Irish improvised/contemporary music scene since the early 2000s, the devastating wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine have made even music-making a challenge. Like many people, Kimura admits to feeling at a loss, and feeling helpless "both as a person and a musician."

In this interview, Kimura reflects upon her musical upbringing in Japan and the travails of building a new life as a professional musician in Ireland. She talks improvisation and composition, discusses her duo album Kairos with Gerry Hemingway, and sheds slight upon some of her other significant collaborations with the likes of Barry Guy, Cora Lunny and Anthony Kelly. In short, she explains how the world around her affects her music.

Compartmentalizing

The time of this interview was rearranged so that Kimura could participate in a rally in Wicklow calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Similar rallies have been held throughout Ireland.

"What we are seeing is the worst thing I've ever witnessed in my lifetime," says Kimura of the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. "It affects me, simply just believing in honesty and humanity, and keep doing what I'm doing, making music, and believing in it—that kind of attitude becomes a little bit fragile, and I start questioning myself. I have that 'what can I do?' type of feeling."

The feeling of horror and helplessness are commonplace, but because she is a creative soul, Kimura refuses to see herself as any more affected by suffering as the next person doing perhaps a more mundane job.

"I don't want to differentiate, to say, I have a creative job, therefore it affects me more... but of course everything affects my music, more and more, I've been training myself to be affected, in a sense, so yes it's really difficult."

Yet in this sense, artists are a little different. They seek inspiration in their environment. They will it to affect them in a positive way. After all, what is music but a reflection of the human condition?

But sometimes, like now, when the worst brutality of the world invades our TV screens and devices daily, a coping strategy is necessary. "Of course, we have to compartmentalize to keep living," rationalizes Kimura.

"In the past I feel I compartmentalized too much, in order to survive, and that affected me in a negative way in a sense. So, I decided to try undoing it, but it is difficult, being affected by all, and to keep going. It is a luxury, if you think about it, to be able to really feel things. And it is a balance, of course, between these two things—to feel fully and to keep going."

UnCaged

Through the ups and downs of life, Kimura has kept going, producing a singular body of work that began with the solo piano album Asymmetry (Diatribe Records, 2010)—interpretations of music by Japanese and Irish composers, with Kimura's playing hailed by The Irish Times for 'heroic levels of technical fearlessness, stamina and strength....'

These qualities are ever-present when Kimura performs. Few who attended the Galway Jazz Festival 2016 for example, will forget Kimura's hour-long performance, on a 1939 Steinway, of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano—a devilishly complex work.

Simply to accept the challenge of performing what is one of Cage's crowning achievements requires a certain type of courage—a quality that Kimura does not want for.

A Long Shot: Barry Guy and Gerry Hemingway

In 2023 Kimura celebrated the release of Kairos ((Fundacja Słuchaj!), a splendid duo recording with drummer/percussionist Gerry Hemingway. The roots of their collaboration date back to 2016, when Kimura caught a Hemingway gig in Switzerland. She was immediately struck by his approach to performance.

"I am always kind of searching and I was searching, I think, for some kind of role model or mentor in freer music playing. When I heard Gerry play, I felt it was a long shot, but I knew I just had to approach and play with him, because I really felt that I had encountered someone I could learn so much from directly. I also felt like that when I first saw Barry Guy and that happened in the same year."

Kimura approached both musicians separately and invited them to Ireland the following year to play with her in duo settings.

"I really didn't know what I was doing," laughs Kimura. "I felt like I was too brave, doing something completely outrageous. We did concerts here [see review of Kimura's gig with Barry Guy here]. It was challenging but felt really good. So, I kept going."

It seemed almost logical to bring Guy and Hemingway together in a trio, but for Kimura it was a big step. "My improvising history at that point wasn't that long—I really felt like a beginner. I hadn't really been listening to much free-improvised music, which I should have," she laughs. "Playing with those masters as a beginner was a crazy idea, but I felt I could play, I really wanted to. So, why not? That was the start."

The collaboration bore fruit soon after with Illuminated Silence (Fundacja Sluchaj, 2019). A live set recorded in St. Ann's Church, Dublin, it provided thrilling confirmation that Kimura had been right to trust her instincts. As an improvisor, albeit one relatively new to the practice, she belonged in this rarefied company.

The Kimura, Guy, Hemingway trio has since played many concerts and there are plans afoot to record again.

Kairos

After a hiatus, Kimura resumed her duo with Hemingway. Kairos was recorded in Dublin's National Concert Hall and in Lucerne, where Hemingway lives. "Gerry did a lot of great mixing work to make the album sound so good. It is so beautifully done," acknowledges Kimura. "I am very grateful for that."

Though compositional credits are shared, the music—minimalist and nuanced at one extreme, untethered and stormy at the other—comes across as lightly conceptualized, inviting and encouraging improvisational dialogues around percussive, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic impulses. "Ninety percent of the music on this album is improvised," Kimura confirms.

"It feels very natural as well as wonderfully challenging," says Kimura of the duo's dynamics. "Gerry is an amazing master with an exquisite sensitivity. He's super-fast in his interaction, and very supportive. He plays the pitches with my piano a lot, on marimba and vibraphone, also singing, as well as with his drum set so we can interact in many ways. There are a lot of elements in our duo. It feels like anything is possible."

The one outlier composition on Kairos is the traditional Bahamian song "Over the Tide," which features Hemingway on vocals. It is, however, representative of the duo's live shows.

"Gerry also likes to sing songs from the '60s or '70s, which I used to listen to a lot," Kimura explains. "For example, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' by The Band, or other Levon Helm songs. Also, he is really into Elliott Smith and introduced his music to me. We play such songs as they are, or we put our own interpretation on them. We have just started these explorations and are hoping to do more."

Ocean Songs

From reimagining Japanese and Irish compositions to tackling John Cage, from classical ensembles to jazz and contemporary improvisation, from Bahamian folk to '60s and '70's pop, Kimura is hardly genre shy. One wonders if it is all one great big musical ocean for Kimura, or whether she finds it necessary to compartmentalize as she moves between musical stools.

"That's a really nice question and I think about this myself. I don't really have a straight answer, because sometimes I have to compartmentalize it—can feel like I'm using different parts of my brain according to what I'm doing, but at the same time I really want them all to be one big ocean that I am travelling in, in a tiny little boat, trying to steer," Kimura explains.

"At the same time, if I have that kind of attitude then everything becomes just music, which is wonderful, but maybe that is simplifying too much. So, I go back and forth between that approach and also just sitting down and dealing with what I'm involved in right now. But it's all music, of course."

Kimura talks of the need to respect her own approach to music making, of being transparent and fully committed. She admits that she tends to diminish herself. "I think that's the way I was brought up. I am working on that, to feel more confident about my own voice."

Yokohama and Tokyo Days

Music was ever present in Kimura's childhood home in Yokohama. "I was surrounded by classical music because my mother was a serious music lover and used to sing classical music. I wanted to be a musician since I was a small child."

Kimura enrolled in a classical music school of some reputation, in Tokyo but the reality did not match her expectations. "It was supposed to be one of the best conservatoires, but it was really disappointing for me. I was really looking forward to it, being able to learn about music, not just playing the piano, but music in a bigger sense. But it was the opposite. It was competitive, and fear-based. You were afraid of making mistakes. For me it was a torture. Because it was so frustrating musically."

This was in the '90s, before the advent of the internet. Kimura would often go to the library after her studies, searching for musical inspiration. She would rent CDs, cassettes and all the LPs she could get her hands on. "I was listening to other types of music all the time"

She discovered jazz and listened avidly to jazz pianists. "It was a completely different world of music," Kimura recalls. "I didn't know what was going on. I felt I needed to get out of the world I was in then and go into the real world of music. It was quite difficult," she admits, "to find the direction."

Despite her disillusionment with the conservatoire Kimura graduated well. She immediately chose a completely different direction in her life by leaving Japan for Ireland.

A One-Way Ticket... On A Gut Instinct

"People ask why Ireland? I just didn't know any other way than to go to a completely unknown place. I didn't want to go anywhere that I saw the slightest sign of what I already was tired of. I just felt like I had to come here. I have made a lot of decisions in my life just on a gut feeling," Kimura laughs.

"The biggest thing was that I was tired of approaching music as an art, something grandioso and very far away from everyday life. I was attracted to the way Irish music was woven into everyday life. I felt then, being an artisan was more meaningful than being an artist. And I somehow felt the Irish way resonated with my ideas, without really knowing anything about it."

Inevitably, it took Kimura some time to adjust. "Obviously, I brought with me here the way I was brought up. Of course, it did change over time. The first thing I had to do was not evolving musically but personally. All of a sudden, I became a mother," she says laughing. "I had two kids before I had any career. Soon after I became a single mother. So, it was always just about trying to survive."

Kimura was in her thirties by the time she was able to dedicate herself seriously to music again, but she counts her blessings.

"I am so grateful that everything worked out. My sons are adults now, and they are wonderful people. I am very lucky. And I'm still playing music. But it was not easy, I couldn't do that again. Everything I can do now is a bonus."

Creative Impulse

Evolving as a person seemed to go hand in hand with evolving musically, as Kimura moved from a musician who recites to one who creates.

"I always wanted to improvise and compose music, rather than playing something that I had learnt. That was always a big thing, and my music did evolve very tightly with what happened in my life. As I had to become more independent as a person, because I had no choice, and to take the responsibility—all these things affected my music. They really evolved together, I think."

Around the time that she released Asymmetry, Kimura began to record solo piano pieces, publishing them on Soundcloud. "This was the start of getting into this idea of improvising in front of people and releasing it to the world."

Playing the Environment

As a solo pianist, Kimura has wowed audiences both home and abroad. At the same time, she has also nurtured and developed some fascinating collaborations. Folding (Farpoint Recordings, 2021) with sound artist Anthony Kelly and violinist Cora Lunny was inspired by environmental sounds in the townlands surrounding Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. It has proven to be a pivotal project in Kimura's development as a musician.

"That changed the way I listen to everything, for sure, and changed the way I play and improvise. I started to really listen more deeply and rather than setting a musical goal and working towards it I just sat there really listened to the sounds around us. Yeah, definitely that was really important. And it is still ongoing as well. Hopefully we will do more with the same team."

The Folding project also helped deepen the musical bond between Kimura and Lunny. A striking improvised duo album, Invisible Resistances (Farpoint Recordings, 2022) ensued, recorded in the middle of pandemic lockdown.

"We stood far away from each other and played with our eyes closed," Kimura explains. "When we play music, it is a very internal way of playing. We just go inside ourselves. Somehow, we meet and interact there, it goes into very deep inside."

Friends and Lovers

These two albums are laden with contrasting colors and textures. It is no coincidence that Kimura's website features choice quotations from painters and artists that illuminate the act of creativity. One from Russian/French artist Marc Chagall stands out: 'All colors are the friends of their neighbors and lovers of their opposites'—a quotation which encapsulates the range and contrasts in Kimura's playing.

The connection between the arts and music is one that fires Kimura's creative juices.

"I really love thinking about these things," Kimura enthuses. "When I'm improvising, I often see visuals or feel textures. I feel strongly the connections between the colours, shapes, and textures and the harmonies and rhythms.

"Recently, I have been trying to work on the connection between words and music. It's a little bit different, of course, but at the same time, everything is connected. Even just one word can evoke different images and stories that can be translated into music, and vice versa. I always make connections between music and other art forms."

Searching

These are busy times for Kimura. Apart from a second trio recording with Barry Guy and Gerry Hemingway, Kimura is once again in the recording studio with Guy, Olesya Zdorovetska and Nick Roth. For this latter project Kimura is creating music inspired by the work of Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa (1893-1933). "The poem is from the book Spring and Asura, and it was self-published 100 years ago. The next year is the 100th anniversary. I am looking forward to this too."

After all these years building a highly respected career it comes as something of a surprise to learn that there is a burning question that Kimura still grapples with. "What is my own voice? Do I know my own voice?" she asks herself.

"I always had this question before but now it is becoming bigger, a top-of-the-list question. I don't feel I can get the answer straightaway. So, I just have to keep doing what I'm doing and gradually maybe I will find the answer, or by thinking about it, it will define the course of music."

Maybe there is no simple answer. Perhaps it is the journey of constant searching and questioning that best defines Kimura as a musician. "Yeah, I think so," says Kimura, "but I keep asking anyway."

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