Interesting mix makes up Murasaki Ensemble by Andrew Gilbert Times Correspondent
The koto wasn't born to rock and roll, but Shirley Muramoto has discovered that swing may be its thing. A master of the classical 13-string Japanese zither, Muramoto established the instrument's incompatibility with rock through her own experimentation.
Back in 1989 she founded the Murasaki Ensemble with the unlikely instrumentation of four kotos, electric guitar, flute and drum kit, creating a band that was unique if sonically unwieldy.
"I felt like I was fighting to be heard with the other instruments," Muramoto said over lunch at Santa Fe Bistro in downtown Berkeley. "It was a little too much. And it was a bit of a hassle having four koto players, trying to tune between numbers. That's the thing about the koto; it has 13 strings, and we have to tune a lot."
The Oakland native learned how to play koto from her mother, a highly regarded teacher who took up the instrument as a child while confined in the Tule Lake and Topaz internment camps during World War II.
While fully versed in the instrument's classical repertoire, Muramoto was determined to bring the koto into new musical situations, so when the original band faltered she turned to the ensemble's flutist Matt Eakle. Best known as a longtime member of the Dave Grisman Quintet, Eakle suggested incorporating several new players, and the Murasaki Ensemble was reborn as an all-acoustic quintet featuring guitarist Jeff Massanari, standup bassist Alex Baum and percussionist extraordinaire Vince Delgado. Over the past seven years, the group has developed into one of the most fascinating jazz-related bands in the Bay Area.
"I thought there's got to be a way to integrate the koto into different kinds of music, but I didn't want to change it too much," Muramoto said. "Besides June Kuramoto of Hiroshima, I really didn't have many people to look up to. She's a real trailblazer as far as that goes. Sometimes I'd try things like tuning it to Western scales and people would say, "Wow, that sounds like a guitar, or a harp,' and I didn't want to do that because you may as well get a guitar. I wanted to keep the character but put it in another context or genre. So that's what we decided to do."
The Murasaki Ensemble plays a rare club date at Yoshi's on Monday, celebrating Delgado's 70th birthday and the release of the band's fourth CD, "Birds & Drums."Â Covering everything from Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood" and Horace Silver's "song for My Father," to Malian composer Toumani Diabate's "Marielle" and Lennon and McCartney's "And I Love Her," the group creates gorgeously textured music drawing on a huge variety of rhythmic traditions.
The band also plays a good deal of original music, much of it written by Delgado, a world music pioneer who has played a key role in numerous Bay Area music scenes. Growing up in a Mexican-American family in San Francisco's Mission District, Delgado aspired to play jazz, idolizing Gene Krupa. Always drawn to new sounds, he began exploring Middle Eastern music, which started a far-flung musical journey that has taken him around the world. He has collaborated with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
In a remarkable coincidence, he studied koto in the early '60s with Madame Suwada, the same instructor who taught Muramoto's mother the instrument in the internment camps. In the Murasaki Ensemble. Delgado plays a variety of percussion implements, including the riqq, an Egyptian tambourine that can function like an entire percussion section, and the Egyptian tabla, a ceramic drum with a fish-skin membrane.
"We all come from different backgrounds," Delgado said. "We're all Americans, so we all know blues and jazz, rock and hip-hop. I've been doing Middle Eastern music for 40 years and work with Arabic groups and Greek groups, and I'm encouraged to bring that to the table. I have so much stuff floating around in my head, I love it when people give me that wide open space to create."
March 13, 2003, Contra Costa Times
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