Doctor Umezu Band - Eight Eyes and Eight Ears (ITM)

Out of the many records cut by the Doctor Umezu Band during the 80s, this 1985 session released by the German label ITM is the only one I've come across. If this discography (Japanese only) is accurate, it's their sixth album, so I can only wonder how their music developed. In any case, it's a wonderful early slice of the soulful and vibrant sound Kazutoki Umezu has continued to mine for the past twenty years and it marks the period when he first came into contact with the thriving post-jazz underground in Manhattan, then in the peak phase of the celebrated "downtown scene". Umezu would go on to collaborate extensively with downtown folks, making the trek over from Tokyo often enough to become a familiar presence at the Knitting Factory and releasing a handful of notable records, highlighted by 1987's Abandon in duo with cellist Tom Cora and the 1992 masterpiece Eclecticism, possibly the finest hour for both Umezu (not counting Omedeto) and guitarist Marc Ribot (sitting right alongside his monstrous Rootless Cosmopolitans) and one of the truly essential documents of that era that captures a prototypical downtown synthesis of post-Ayler jazz, rock, swing, blues, surf, and funk.

Eight Eyes and Eight Ears is an unmistakably dated album; Takeharu Hayakawa's electric bass guitar and Takashi Kikuchi's drumkit never stray from the sort of lockstep stiff funk grooves that ruined countless albums in the 1980s as the human race suffered through the growing pains of drum machine technology. I generally can't abide that slick, mechanical rhythmicality, but I count this disc as an example of how great music can be made within any aesthetic framework, no matter how depraved. I won't go so far as saying these grooves actually breathe (to hear that achieved in the most profound way within the same rhythmic zeitgeist, look no further than Bill Connors' timeless work from the same period), but they do move in all the right directions to enhance the explosive joyfulness of Umezu and Hiroaki Katayama's catchy riffing and squealing, so the music transcends its dated sound. There's also an impressive level of nuance and craft in Hayakawa's playing on the ever-problematic bass guitar.

In "Dekoboko-Yama/The Bumby Mountain on the Bank", Hayakawa and Kikuchi jump from the gate with a punchy, slightly jagged groove that could almost pass for something off Massacre's Killing Time (but of course neither this album nor any other album ever made short of The Stick Men gets anywhere close to the rhythmic ecstacy of the mythical Frith/Laswell/Maher unit). Somehow these clipped and clear rhythms remind me of a video game that I played a few times when I was a kid called Pac Man, in which the player maneuvers a crude round yellow thing with eyes and a pie wedge mouth meant to suggest a head whose sole purpose is to traverse a maze and chomp on little electronic nuggets without getting eaten by other critters from the zoo of vintage digital minimalism. Curiously enough, via overdubbing Hayakawa also provides some soft background electric guitar spikes alongside his ripping bass line, as if to make explicit reference to Massacre, though only briefly and weakly before Umezu and Katayama take over with twin sax riffing and the tune playfully bounces between themes and tempi with a passing episode of jackhammer breakdowns a la Etron Fou Leloublan.

The use of overdubbing, while fairly limited, tasteful and effective (except Umezu's superfluous piano jabs in the first track), is another aspect of the album that pins the music down to an era when jazz records became produced more like pop albums than attempts to capture the feeling of a live band. Happily Umezu survived this with a session that invigorates and delights twenty years later instead of the hideously popified skeletons in the 80s closet of creative jazz peers like Oliver Lake and Jamaaladeen Tacuma.

While I can't say there's anything truly great about the rhythm section playing here, it maintains a consistent creative edge and justifies the post-funk alternatives to bop rhythms as an expansion of the jazz lexicon that isn't limited to slick commercialism. What makes the record great is Umezu's tunes and his killer alto sax and bass clarinet playing in tandem with Hiroaki Katayama's tenor sax. Their styles are so idiomatic they almost seem quotational (Rollins, Ayler, Adderly, etc), so everything boils down to good old fashioned melody and soul carried on a fat, beautiful tone. These guys have the gutbucket soulfulness and melodic clarity of George Cartwright in the classic early days of Curlew, most certainly a kindred group in the pursuit of avant-garde party music at the time and probably the most musically successful. The sheer tunefulness of the music is hard to resist; almost every melody on this album sounds lifted from a traditional folk tune of some East European or Mediterranean variety or another, and counts as an early entry to the rich explosion of klezmer-infused creative music of the past two decades. A precursor to some of Ken Vandermark's great reconciliations of post-Ayler reed rawness and concrete grooviness, tracks like "Keep Your Hands Off the Door" find Umezu and Katayama in hard funk riffing synchrony with bass guitar and drumkit grooves going hard and deep into the pocket, only to rip into unbridled screams of passion a moment later.

Free of any blemishes I could cite, Eight Eyes and Eight Ears is a minor classic of light-hearted post-jazz that's gassed me up everytime I've pulled it out since it first passed through my stereo some six years ago and I've yet to be disappointed by an Umezu disc.

~Michael Anton Parker