Everyday Magician
Ryuichi Sakamoto, revered electronic pop pioneer and much-garlanded film composer, left us on March 28.
THE SON of a Tokyo literary editor father and hat designer-cum-piano teacher mother, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music, in its many manifestations, evinced a parallel marriage of ascetic precision and virtuoso flourish. It was evident in his best-known composition, the aching instrumental, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, part of the soundtrack to Nagisa Ōshima’s eponymous 1983 movie, in which Sakamoto also acted, alongside David Bowie.
Born in 1952, and a pianist from the age of three, Sakamoto studied composition at Tokyo’s National University of Fine Arts, abjuring classes on European serialism – he preferred Bach – and becoming immersed in computer music and synthesizers. He also played in extracurricular jazz combos and folk groups, all the while gorging on global sounds,
“I’m just delighted… to listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.” RYUICHI SAKAMOTO
from Afrobeat to early Kraftwerk
– a stylistic cocktail that would eventually feed into the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the group he formed with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi in 1978.
YMO’s self-titled debut would successfully alloy avant-garde quirkiness with Sakamoto’s earworm synth melodies, heralding the trio’s rapid ascent to domestic superstar status. Three of YMO’s subsequent albums would top the Japanese charts, with benchmarks like 1979’s sequencer-propelled Solid State Survivor helping catalyse incipient electro-pop, while singles like Computer Game and Behind The Mask impacted European and American charts.
Dubbed ‘The Professor’ by his bandmates, pop stardom ultimately irked Sakamoto – “I love to be anonymous,” he once averred – and after the band dissolved in 1983 he picked up a maverick solo career that had commenced with 1978’s experimental pop curio Thousand Knives and would go on to include everything from 1983 electro workout Riot In Lagos to oriental-occidental mash-up LPs like 1987’s
Neo Geo, abetted by Bill Laswell and Iggy Pop, and the Satie-like études of 1999’s BTTB, not to mention his opening ceremony music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
A sometime collaborator with the similarly pop-averse David Sylvian (their 1983 single Forbidden Colours – a vocal reworking of Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence – was a major hit, nonetheless), his later minimal electronic albums with the likes of Alva Noto and Taylor Deupree were critically lauded. Soundtracks for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky won Sakamoto a 1988 Oscar and a 1991 Golden Globe respectively, and his shelves boasted Grammys and a BAFTA for the extensive film work that occupied much of his later creative life.
Resident for three decades in lower Manhattan, Sakamoto was married three times and fathered four children, including pop chanteuse Miu Sakamoto. A committed environmentalist and opponent of nuclear energy, he survived throat cancer in 2014. “I’m just delighted to be living… to listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree”, he declared. The disease would eventually snare him, but that ingenuous, enchanted spirit pervades the music he leaves behind. David Sheppard
Ahmad Jamal
Jazz piano great
BORN 1930 EXUDING AN air of elegance and subtlety in both music and life, Ahmad Jamal was a highly individual jazz pianist whose refined, thoughtful conception both set him apart from and made its mark on jazz piano history.
Born in Pittsburgh and christened Fritz Jones – the name change came in 1950 after trumpeter Idrees Sulieman introduced him to Islam – young Jamal studied classics and jazz simultaneously, and his formative influences included Errol Garner (“a milestone in pianistics”), Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Early trios followed the Nat Cole piano-guitarbass model (with guitarist Ray Crawford developing the much imitated ‘conga’ effect by tapping his frets), though in the mid-1950s he replaced the guitar with drums and developed an atmospheric, spacious (Jamal insisted on “disciplined”) style that found commercial success; his distinctive block-chorded version of folk tune Billy Boy was an early hit.
Miles Davis was taken with both his approach (Davis encouraged his pianists Red Garland and Wynton Kelly to emulate Jamal) and Jamal’s nuanced, understated take on standards, several of which (Autumn Leaves, Just Squeeze Me, My Funny Valentine, etc) the trumpeter adapted for his own hugely influential recordings. Gil Evans artfully translated Jamal’s composition New Rhumba for Davis’s 1957 big band album Miles Ahead, though the best place to savour Jamal’s 1950s pianistic majesty remains his classic At The Pershing: But Not For Me (Chess 1958) featuring the hit Poinciana, with the beautifully balanced trio completed by Israel Crosby (bass) and Vernell Fournier (drums).
Performing and recording prolifically into his late eighties, Jamal latterly displayed a more robust, percussive piano style, balancing denser-than-expected treatments of standards with tumultuous original compositions, a stylistic shift he put down to his mature confidence. “You have a greater flow of ideas when you have more confidence,” he once said. “It’s more fluidity, fluency.”
Chris Ingham
Seymour Stein
The sire of Sire
BORN 1942
WHEN HE was 13, Brooklynite Seymour Stein hung out at Billboard magazine to research his great passion, the pop charts. As a young man, he was mentored by George Goldner at the Red Bird label and by King Records’ Syd Nathan, who sent him out as James
Brown’s tour manager in 1961. After Stein met producer Richard Gottehrer at the Brill Building, they founded Sire records in 1968. The independent had a freak hit with Focus’s Hocus Pocus in 1973, but more lasting success followed after punk broke: aided by his wife Linda, Stein would sign acts including Ramones, Talking Heads and Madonna, and later Lou Reed, Brian Wilson and Ice-T. With an ear for British talent, Sire also released Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, Pet Shop Boys, Madness and The Cure. “I like to hear great songs,” he told MOJO in 2018, “I don’t jump on bandwagons.” He was also Vice President at Warner Bros, who had owned Sire since 1978, and helped set up the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983. After retirement in 2018, he published his memoir, Siren Song: My Life In Music.
Ian Harrison
Jah Shaka
Sound system heavyweight
BORN C.1950
JAH SHAKA brought righteous energy and social conscience to UK sound system culture. Born in Clarendon parish, Jamaica circa 1950, he arrived in London in 1956 and played harmonica, drums and guitar in school and church before joining Freddie Cloudburst’s sound system in south-east London, playing Motown and R&B in the mid ’60s. By the early ’70s, he was running his own outfit, playing dub and steppers at high volume to a fanbase which included The Slits and Public Image Ltd. In 1980 he cameo’d in Franco Rossi’s film Babylon, and set up the Jah Shaka Music label, whose releases included the Commandments Of Dub series and collaborations with Horace Andy, Max Romeo and Mad Professor. He also founded the Jah Shaka Foundation in 1992, funding educational projects in Jamaica, Ethiopia and Ghana, and played his last show in Paris on April 1.
Lois Wilson
Keith Reid
Procol Harum lyricist
BORN 1946
KEITH REID, the non-performing lyric writer of magisterial rockers Procol Harum, knew his obituary would dwell on the band’s debut single – the Summer of Love outlier smash A Whiter Shade Of Pale – to the exclusion of everything else he’d contributed to over the ensuing six decades. These included 11 Procol studio albums (Reid was only absent from their 2017 swan song Novum), two sets with his Keith Reid Project, and lyrics for others (including Michel Polnareff, Southside Johnny and John Farnham, whose You’re The Voice was a hit in 1986). Influenced by Dylan’s mid-’60s phase, Welwyn Garden City-born Reid took, “a painterly approach to lyrics,” he told this writer, though he acknowledged his family’s Holocaust experiences, “coloured me… I was aware of the dark side.” Nine months before his death from cancer, he admitted he had come round to his most celebrated work. “I couldn’t stand hearing A Whiter Shade Of Pale for a period,” he said. “But I came to realise how great it was.”
Martin Aston
“I like to hear great songs. I don’t jump on bandwagons.” SEYMOUR STEIN
Nora Forster
Lydon’s better half
BORN 1942
NORA MAIER was born in Munich as the Battle of Stalingrad drew to its end. In the post-war years her newspaper editor father Franz Karl Maier prosecuted Nazis and fought for press freedom. A model and sometime actress whose first husband was West German pop star Frank Forster, Nora later promoted gigs in Germany and Britain. Having moved to London in the late ’60s, punk and its milieu changed her life when her 14-year-old daughter Ari Up formed The Slits and she met Johnny Rotten in Westwood and McLaren’s boutique Sex in 1975.
They married in 1979, and remained a solid partnership in the years that followed, as Lydon navigated his post-Pistols life and Public Image Ltd. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2018, prompting
PiL’s 2023 song of love and remembrance Hawaii. Her full-time carer, Lydon spoke movingly of his wife’s illness, recognising how her personality endured and saying, “she will enjoy every step of it, and I’m here to make sure of that because she’d do the same for me.”
Ian Harrison
Ian Bairnson
Esteemed guitar-for-hire.
BORN 1953
CLIVE JAMES recalled turning up the radio to hear every last note of Ian Bairnson’s “exultant” solo on Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, while Pilot’s 1975 smash January saw the Scot craft pop hooks. Born in the Shetland Islands, Bairnson picked with a sixpence, but soon coined it as a favoured sessionguitarist in Edinburgh then London, eventually playing on 100-plus LPs by artists from Kate Bush to Neil Diamond to Paul McCartney & Wings. Together with Pilot’s David Paton, Bairnson was also an integral part of prog act The Alan Parsons Project from 1975 to 1990, helping the sometime Pink Floyd (and Pilot) producer define his own sound. In 2018, Bairnson’s dementia ended a live career that had seen him flank Sting and Stanley Clarke, but he continued recording. When he died on April 7, his wife Leila mourned “the kindest, most loving husband.”
James McNair