The Last Samurai (25 page)

After the Wigmore Hall episode his agent was quoted as saying that on a purely personal level he looked on him as a son but on a purely business level there were a lot of considerations, obviously they were both professionals & he wouldn’t be doing him any favours if he continued to handle him purely as a personal favour.

Yamamoto hardly ever gave concerts now & no one knew whether this was his own choice or forced on him by prudent managements. The interviewer of the
Sunday Times
was trying to probe this and other hot topics while Yamamoto tried to explore the nature of percussion & other musical issues.

ST: I don’t think anyone really understands why you went to Chad—

Yamamoto: Well, my teacher had always emphasised that one should keep the piano from sounding like a percussive instrument—you probably know that Chopin tried to produce the effect of a vocal line on the piano—and for years I kept thinking: But if it’s a percussive instrument why shouldn’t it sound like one?

He said that at the time he had this idea that drums were percussion in its purest form & that he would never understand the piano until he understood percussion in its purest form. He said he had come to see later that in a lot of ways this was an overreaction and that any sound that the instrument could make was obviously a sound it could make so that it was oversimplistic not to let it sound like a voice or a cello to the extent that it could, but at the time he was obsessed with drums & percussion.

ST: Interesting.

Yamamoto said the other thing his teacher had always emphasised had been what she called the backbone of the piece. It was not enough to perfect a beautiful surface which sounded like the human voice or a cello or some other non-percussive instrument because in the final analysis attention should not stop at the surface but be directed to the musical structure.

He said that when he was small he would sometimes work day and night to get some passage the way she wanted, at last he would think Yes, that sounds good & she would say Yes, that is very pretty but where is the music? And she would say of this or that international star, Oh so and so, he’s just a virtuoso, with the utmost contempt, because if someone was not a musician he was a charlatan.

ST: Interesting.

He said: Now the thing is of course I could see what she meant, but later I started to think, Yes, but why are we so afraid of everything and what are we afraid of? We’re afraid of the surface, we’re afraid it will sound like what it is, what terrible thing will happen if we stop running away from these things?

Then when he was 16 he came across a book called
Drums over Africa
.

Drums over Africa
was written by an Australian named Peter McPherson who had travelled around Africa in the early 20s. He took with him a wind-up gramophone and several recordings of Mozart, and the book was full of amusing episodes in which he astounded the natives with the machine or kept his wits about him to keep them from stealing it.

Most of the time people simply admired the machine itself without commenting on the music, but in one village he met a critic. This man said that the music seemed thin and uninteresting, and when he had said it several other people agreed but they could not explain why. At last they brought out a collection of drums and began to play on these—it is common in African music for two competing rhythms to be played simultaneously, but here the players unleashed six or seven. McPherson said it took some time to get used to, but as no one showed the slightest interest in appropriating the gramophone he stayed there for some time. For two months he saw nothing but the small-to-medium-sized drums brought out on the first day, but one day he saw an extraordinary ceremony.

The village was described by McPherson as a 20-day trek from St. Pierre, in a kind of desert scrub, on the edge of a small desert lake, with a sheer rock bluff at the other side, and though the first mountain foothills were maybe 20 miles away this seemed to be the same kind of rock. He had often noticed one hut a little distance from the rest, but when he had once approached it he had been warned away, and he had never seen anyone enter or leave it.

One day in the late afternoon he saw seven men enter the hut. They came out each carrying a drum taller than a man, and they carried the drums in silence to the edge of the lake and set them down in a row on the shore. Then a group of women came from another house. They carried a boy on a pallet; he seemed to have some fever, for he was wasted away and shivered and trembled as they carried him. They were singing a song in which one woman called out a line and then the others called softly back, and they laid the pallet on the shore. They stopped singing and stepped away.

The sun was near the horizon; at any moment it would be dark, for it sets quickly in the tropics. The sky was a deep dark blue. The men tilted the drums against wooden rests; they began to tap the drums very lightly with sticks, and the sound seemed to melt away over the lake. Then they stopped, and at a gesture from the leader they struck the drums a single louder blow. They stopped. Another beat. Another beat. Another beat. When they had struck the drums six times like this the sun vanished and they struck the drums once, very loudly, and stopped. Several seconds went by, until at last, from over the dark water, the sound of the drums came back. Again they struck the drums, and again the sound came back, and when this had happened seven times they laid down their sticks and walked away, and the women picked up the pallet and walked away, and McPherson saw that the boy was dead. In the morning the drums were gone.

Yamamoto said: There was something about this, the idea of percussion in its purest form coming through the air & at the same time over water, and at last hitting rock & coming back, you know coming through this very thin medium & also over a denser one & against a very solid one—& I thought I just have to hear this. I don’t know how but I’ve got to.

For the next few years whenever Yamamoto met someone from Africa he would describe this episode in
Drums over Africa
but no one seemed to know about percussion in its purest form and the rock and water and air.

When he was 19 it was arranged that he would spend six months studying in Paris. One of the other students was from Chad, and Yamamoto asked again about percussion in its purest form and the student was rather annoyed, because whenever people thought of African music all they thought of was drums.

Drums drums drums, said this friend, if anything the most important element in African music (insofar as it made sense to generalise about
African
music which it did not) was the voice.

Don’t talk to me about the voice, I said, I am not interested in the voice but in percussion in its purest form, & I told him about the drums & the lake, & I said it was a 20-day trek from a place that used to be called St. Pierre

& he said he did know of a place that used to be called that but it couldn’t be the one because the people in that area had a totally different kind of music, they have these professional musicians, these griots who sing ballads and nothing like what I had described would happen there

& I said But is it a desert and is there a lake

& he said Yes but it can’t possibly be there

& then he said Forget about Africa, you don’t know what you want, I’m getting together some people to put on Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples stick around & you can have the piano

ST: So you went to Chad.

Yamamoto: That’s right.

Yamamoto said that when he finally found the place there was something almost magical about it—the lake was there, and the hill, and the hut a little way apart, and the people who would play a piece of music with six or seven rhythms all at once. The things they played while he was there melted away over the lake, and he never got to hear the other drums.

Yamamoto: I’d managed to set aside two months, which was practically unheard of; got to Chad;
incredible
hassle getting out to the village, isn’t there some movie about a guy who tries to take Caruso up the Amazon?

ST: Yes?

Yamamoto: With Klaus Kinski?

ST: Yes?

Yamamoto: Well, that gives you some idea, and then to top it all I get maybe two weeks, maximum, in the village with the drums and then Kaboom! It’s gone.

ST: This is the part a lot of people find hard to believe.

Yamamoto: I know, I know, how could I even
think
of going two months without practising? Sometimes I have trouble believing it myself.

Yamamoto had been staying in the village and one day he bicycled over to the mountains to see some rock paintings, taking a boy from the village as his guide. He had noticed a lot of soldiers around but he had never had the time to be interested in politics. When they got back to the village everyone in it was dead. The boy said they would kill him if they found him and Yamamoto had to help him get away. At first Yamamoto said there was nothing he could do but the boy said you’ve got to help me.

They were alone in a village full of dead bodies. Yamamoto said Don’t you have to beat the drum for them? Or is that only for the dying?

The boy said I am too young, and then he said No, you are right.

He went to the hut. Yamamoto followed him. Inside were seven drums, but five were almost eaten away by termites, and one was quite badly damaged, and only one still stood upright. The boy took it from the hut and set it up on the shore of the lake. It seemed to be made from the trunk of some hardwood tree, though Yamamoto had never seen anything but low twisted bushes of scrub in the area.

The boy tilted the drum back against a stand, and when it was late afternoon he began to strike the drum very lightly with a stick. When the sun was close to the horizon he struck eight louder blows, and then, when the sun dropped below the horizon, he brought the stick down on the drumhead with all his might. Then he held the stick at his side and waited for several seconds, but no sound came back over the water. Again he struck the drum, and again the sound died away over the water and did not return. Then he struck it a third time so hard the drum quivered and trembled, but no sound came back and he dropped the stick in the sand.

No, he said, it will not come back, there is nothing to come back to—

And he said that they must cut it open and he would hide inside and Yamamoto would take the drum with him when he went.

Yamamoto said this was a stupid plan, the boy would be safer just—

But he couldn’t think of some way the boy would be safer.

The boy was 16, the age Yamamoto had been when he first played Carnegie Hall. He said All right, we’ll see what we can do.

The boy took off the top and got inside, and Yamamoto fastened the covering back on. Then he bicycled to another village and he said he needed transportation back to N’Djamena. He managed eventually to get a small truck that could take the drum, and they drove back to the village. The drum stood by the shore. The boy was inside it. The owner of the truck put the drum on the truck and they drove off.

Fifty miles down the road the truck was stopped by troops. They made the driver take the drum off the truck and they said what’s in that. Nothing said Yamamoto it’s just a drum I’m taking back to Japan. All right then play it said one soldier and Yamamoto tapped it lightly with a stick.

A soldier took off the cover but they had fitted another cover just inside so that it looked as though the drum was solid inside.

Yamamoto said: You see there’s nothing there.

A soldier held up his machine gun, aimed at the drum, and fired a round. There was a scream, and then a whimper, and then all the soldiers fired at the drum while splinters flew up and blood seeped out onto the dirt and when they got tired of shooting they stopped and there was silence.

The soldier said: You’re right there’s nothing there.

Yamamoto thought his turn would be next. A soldier swung up his gun by the barrel and hit him once on the head with the handle. He fell to the ground. He said later that he wasn’t afraid at first because he assumed he was going to die. Then he realised that his hands were lying in the dirt next to the boots of a soldier. He thought they would destroy his hands and he could not move for terror. Then three of them kicked him in the ribs, and he passed out.

When he came to the soldiers and the truck were gone. All that was left was the drum riddled with bullets, the ground beside it wet with blood. His papers and money were gone. His hands were all right.

He checked to see that the boy was dead and he was dead. He had nothing to bury him with, so he started walking. He walked for two days without food or water. Twice trucks passed him and refused to stop. At last one stopped and much much later he got back to Paris.

People were prepared to be sympathetic but he alienated everyone by saying Well obviously my trip didn’t work out the way I’d hoped but the one bright spot is that I got back in time to take part in a production of Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples.

Or people would say was it hard to put it behind you and Yamamoto would say Well when I got back Claude said I was stupid to go he said why are you so obsessed with drums drums are beside the point listen to Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités—

—so the first thing I did when I got back was listen to the Messiaen which is about, well basically it’s about the dying sound. That’s what a piano produces, a dying sound. You know, the hammer strikes the string and then it bounces away again and you just have the string vibrating until it stops, and you can just let that happen or you can prolong it with a pedal or and this is where it gets interesting you have the fact that other strings will vibrate in sympathy with certain frequencies & you can just let
that
happen or you can come in with a pedal at one place or another as it dies—