Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
* Also includes full art & notes PDF booklet
Purchasable with gift card
$11USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Packaged in a deluxe heavyweight stock 6-panel digipak with two sets of liner notes (by Eri Yamamoto & Vince Peterson), full choir credits & complete lyrics in Japanese, Rōmaji transliteration, and English translation.
Includes unlimited streaming of Goshu Ondo Suite
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Eri Yamamoto: piano, compositions
David Ambrosio: bass
Ikuo Takeuchi: drums
Choral Chameleon: choir
Eri Yamamoto transcended jazz, classical and folk forms in creating her new work for jazz trio & 50-member choir. The Japanese-born, New York-based pianist & composer seamlessly melds biography, group improvisation and far-ranging compositional vocabularies in a momentous seven-part suite, featuring her longstanding trio in collaboration with New York-based Choral Chameleon, directed by its award-winning founder, Vince Peterson.
The suite is based off of the “Goshu Ondo,” a traditional circle dance song from Shiga, Japan, where it was sung during the summer Bon festival to warmly welcome ancestral spirits. Composing the Goshu Ondo Suite brought some of Yamamoto’s happiest childhood memories flooding back. The decision to compose for choir was sprung from a desire to bring community into the process of creation – to increase the number of people involved in making & celebrating beautiful sound together. To evoke that joyful sense, her Trio & Choral Chameleon engaged in an intensive & committed rehearsal schedule, with the choir singing in Rōmaji transliteration of the Japanese text. Indeed every member of Choral Chameleon was so engaged with the process that they memorized the piece, performing the exultant November 2018 world premiere by (and with) great heart!
The suite commences with the folk song's melodic kernel from which the rest blooms. Choral Chameleon’s heterophony, polyphony and unison singing interweave with Yamamoto’s trio, often with gorgeous open vowels evocative of natural scenes in works ranging from Claude Debussy through Charles Ives to Duke Ellington. All is bolstered by gentle trio improvisation, Ambrosio and Takeuchi propelling the band forward and ultimately building to a life-affirming choral unison. The second and longest part, with its tempo, dynamic and metric shifts evolving as naturally as breathing, is the tree trunk, fostering development and setting the stage for the various branch movements to follow. All the while, that melodic seed, so deeply enmeshed in the compositional fabric, bears fruit of stunning variety and flavor.
As the final movement’s ecstatic and celebratory rhythms surge, crest and dissipate and the various musical threads converge, a sense of Yamamoto’s transcultural journey is palpable, of many and disparate experiences existing in luminous multi-communal nexus. The coda composition performed by the trio, “Echo of Echo”, provides a final moment of reflection, mirroring the suite’s ultimate descent toward silence; demonstrating, again, that the part is in the whole, which far exceeds the sum of its components.
* Full art & notes included as PDF booklet with Digital Album.
Since moving from her native Japan to NYC in 1995, Eri has established herself as an original & compelling pianist and
composer.
From 2001, Eri has been sharing her uniquely lyrical & evocative music on a series of beautiful album releases & in concert with listeners throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Africa, Jamaica, and Australia.
supported by 20 fans who also own “Goshu Ondo Suite”
I was brought here after listening to a live performance of Makaya's on you tube. I instantly loved the song Holy Lands so much that I had to see if the album version was the same rendition as the live one. Then I listened to the whole album! Universal Beings is a just a groove... It's a mix of traditional and something new, very nice. pandr1900
supported by 18 fans who also own “Goshu Ondo Suite”
This could’ve been my album of the year if I’d noticed it. Hell.
2020, feeling like shit and then this musical balm appears. Live recording on one mic. Just bass and harp. Awesome. It swings like a pendulum do!
Big shout out for Dezron’s love of coffee. I now have 2 of his albums and he’s proselytising on behalf of coffee on both. Damn right ☕️ Crinklechips
The sublime pairing of trumpet & piano on this gorgeous album—which blurs the line between classical & jazz—is the perfect fall soundtrack. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 23, 2022
A vibrant and uplifting jazz record full of interaction and improvisation though created entirely remotely during lockdown. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 4, 2021
supported by 17 fans who also own “Goshu Ondo Suite”
After a precision liftoff in Tabasco and setting a course to travel the space ways from planet to planet, the album peels away through a wormhole just past Saturn in the eponymous track Mayan Space Station to journey through time and space in Canyons of Light. eric F