Last night, Athens, Georgia native and Japanese-American musical treasure Kishi Bashi kicked off his latest tour with a home-town set in the Georgia Theater. It was a magical night and if you weren't there, you missed possibly the best show of the year.
Bonus points: There were seats! We didn't have to stand for the whole show!
Bonus points: There were seats! We didn't have to stand for the whole show!
Atlanta's Japanese-American cello player and new member of Kishi Bashi's band, Takenobu, opened the show accompanied by his recent fiancee, Kathryn Koch, on violin. Their set alone would have been worth the 75-minute drive from Atlanta to Athens. We've been fans of Takenobu for many years now, ever since we first heard his masterful Exposition, but we can honestly say he's upped his game recently and last night he and Kathryn put on the best performance we've heard from him yet.
That was a great way to open the evening, and Takenobu and Ms. Koch returned to the stage as a part of Kishi Bashi's impressive six-person back-up band.
Kaoru Ishibashi is an American singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter. For a few years, he was a member of the band of Montreal but since at least 2012 has been performing as Kishi Bashi. He's put out several delightful albums (151a, Lighght, and Sonderlust), each one seemingly better than the one before, although they're all quite good, and he has just released what sounds like a major statement, his latest album Omoiyari. As Kaoru explained last night, the title is a Japanese term about being considerate, having compassion, and feeling empathy, and the album's overall theme is about the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. Despite the solemnity of the subject matter, however, the album is a delightfully cheerful collection of pop-rock songs, featuring Kaoru's multilayered instruments and sweet alto voice.
Discussing the album on NPR, Kaoru said, “It’s a love story set in World War II, about falling in love in an [Japanese American] incarceration camp and ultimately losing that love. The significance is that the idea of love, loss, and desire are consistent themes throughout history and help us to empathize with a people in a disconnected past.”'
Last night, he played several songs from the new album pretty much in sequence, starting with the lovely Penny Rabbit and Summer Bear, followed by the biting F Delano, and then Marigolds, A Song For You and Summer of '42.
Not to totally confuse his audience, Kaoru patiently explained each of the songs, it's subject matter or it's inspiration, etc. For example, while Angeline sounds like a love song for the titular woman, it's actually named for a work camp in Jim Crow-era Tennessee, where newly freed slaves who had been arrested were forced back into the same manual labor from which they had just been granted emancipation.
That sounds grim and heavy, but Kaoru's sweet voice and the new backing band gave the songs a joyous presence and a lush orchestral backing. They also performed a bunch of songs from older Kishi Bashi records, with the band adding new depth and resonance to the pieces and making the veridically familiar sound sequentially new (there we go again). A special shout-out needs to be given to vocalist and flutist Pip the Pansy (really, that's what Kaoru kept calling her on stage and how she's listed on the album credits), whose flute trills and backup singing really made the ensemble's playing sound so much richer.
He even brought the entire band down into the audience to play several songs unamplified, including the new album's closer, Annie, Heart Thief of the Sea. NPR said that particular song sounded to them like a hootenanny sing-along, and last night, it became exactly that.
The floor show also included the technically challenging Violin Tsunami from the new album, and after three songs, the band returned to the main stage for a grand finale of sorts and their encore set.
We have no idea how long the show lasted because from the moment Takenobu first took the stage for the opening set to the end of Kishi Bashi's encore, we were so entranced that we didn't even look at the time until sometime during the drive home. Bonus points for adventure: the payment machine at the parking lot ate our debit card and didn't return it (we've already cancelled the card and ordered a new one) and the GPS "suggested" that we return home not by the infamous Atlanta Highway of the B-52s Love Shack but by a circuitous route on the distant interstate (we rebuffed the suggestion).
From Athens, the Omoiyari tour jumps to the West Coast for shows in LA, SF, PDX, and Seatac, and then back East for shows in DC, NYC and Boston. If you can catch any of those shows, we strongly encourage you to go, and if you can't, Omoiyari can be purchased directly from Kishi Bashi at their Bandcamp page.
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