Tatsu Aoki
Tatsu Aoki is a jazz double bass player and record producer.
As a musician in the field of Chicago jazz, Aoki has recorded eight bass albums, eight collaborative albums, 13 ensemble works and has appeared as a guest artist on over 60 albums worldwide.
Aoki also directs cultural events that promote both the history of Japanese musical traditions and contemporary Asian influences in genres of jazz and experimental jazz fusion. As the founder and artistic director of Asian Improv aRts Midwest he hosts events such as the annual Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival and the Japanese American Service Committee’s Tsukasa Taiko Legacy arts residency program.
Aoki lives in Oak Park, Illinois and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Biography
Tatsu Aoki is a prolific artist, composer, musician, educator and a consummate bassist and shamisen player. Based in Chicago, Aoki works in a wide range of musical genres, ranging from traditional Japanese music, jazz, and experimental music.Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1957 into an artisan family called TOYOAKI MOTO, Aoki started traditional Tokyo Geisha cultural training and studies at age four to become part of his family’s performing crew during a hard social and economic period that forced many traditional artisan family businesses to close down. After the death of his grandmother, Aoki kept undergoing Tokyo music training until his early teens. Then, he shifted his musical focus to American pop music and experimental music. At this time, he started experimenting with his playing style, reflecting his studies of traditional Japanese music in his approach to playing jazz. He also began producing small gauge experimental films, inspired by his biological father who worked as a movie producer for Shin Toho Studio. During Tokyo’s Underground Arts movement in the early ‘70s, Aoki was an active performer, becoming a member of Japanese Experimental Music ensemble, GINTENKAI, where he refined his style of mixing traditional Japanese music with Western elements.
Under these environments of his childhood, Aoki inherited the historical and traditional essence of the Tokyo Entertainment district’s musical concepts, basics and values of flexible creations and applications as Tokyo Geisha music became mainstream. With the fall of these special districts in the late '60s and early '70s, key musical concepts from Tokyo’s regional entertainment disappeared as did many other art forms.
After coming to the U.S. in 1977, Aoki studied experimental filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Now, he serves as an adjunct Associate Professor at the Film, Video and New Media Department, and teaches a course related to Celluloid and Advanced image-making projects. He also has an experience of teaching film production and history courses. In addition to SAIC, Aoki teaches Asian Identity in Cinema at Northwestern as well. During the late '80s, Aoki became a leading advocate for Chicago's Asian American community and one of Chicago's most in-demand musicians on both contrabasses, taiko, and shamisen.
Aoki’s style strives to preserve the essence of fluidity, flexibility and rawness of live sound and instrumentation. Using Taiko drumming as one of his signature elements, his solo bass performances such as project ‘BASSE LIVE’ and other recordings are known worldwide for their innovative approaches to instrumentation.
His most important ensemble work, ‘ROOTED: Origins of Now’, a 50-minute long 4 movement suite, was performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival in September 2001. The Chicago Tribute recognized Tatsu Aoki as a "Chicagoan of the Year", citing his ensemble piece as a contribution to the vitality of Chicago culture. The Tribune stated that ROOTED had, "come into its own as an eloquent, often dramatic merger of ancient Japanese music and experimental American jazz." JAZZIZ magazine also recognized Aoki as one many artists who has changed jazz since 1980. For his contribution to the Chicago arts scene, the Asian American Institute also awarded him with the Mile Stone Award in 2007.
As an Executive Director of AIRMW, Aoki has initiated and managed several programs to advance the understanding of Asian American culture and community through the arts, including the Annual Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival and the JASC Tsukasa Taiko Legacy arts residency project. His work as an artist and educator in the cultural arts and as a leader in the Asian American community addresses and defines issues facing the community, such as the need for quality artistic programs that reflect the Asian American experience.
Aoki started a project called Miyumi Project, named after his daughter, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The project brings together the distinct music of Asia in the forms of Japanese drums – taiko and shime, Korean drums – Buk, and mixes them with his own jazz bass, and with help from AACM musician Mwata Bowden. Aoki's vision was to create a multicultural soundscape that borrows from the traditional drumming of Asia and African, Latin and European sounds. The show performance is structured so that the Taiko drumming beats a commanding time signature in a very regular pattern while baritone saxophone performers like Mwata Bowden provide improvised sounds. Double reed players such as Robbie Hunsinger also perform call and response tunes to complement the performance. Overall, the multicultural fusion of Western and Asian instruments compares to Chicago percussionist Kahil El Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble but with more emphasis on Japanese traditional instrumentation. Aoki’s also known to provide improvised playing on bass as well during performances. This engaging approach was originally made and championed by Aoki in his pursuit of “true” jazz innovation.
Besides music, Aoki also has an equally historied career working as a passionate filmmaker. He first began making films in regular 8 gauge in early childhood. His biological father, Wahei Hoshino was a movie producer at Shin Toho Movie Studio in the '60s and influenced him into working in small gauge, experimental filmmaking. As much as his musical activities, Tatsu Aoki's films are shown internationally. His super 8 diary films and experimental films with optical printing have gained reputable screenings and support around the world. While working on his filmography, he presented one of the documentaries, 'That Asian Thing', in 2008, and worked as a composer for a short film called 'Farewell, Mr. Griswell' in 2010. He has also published sample versions of films such as ’’Flux, Gate, PUZZLE III, Ah Sou Desuka: Is that So!, and Solution A''.