So I went to Kyoto University yesterday to see Otomo Yoshihide's "New Jazz Big Band", occasionally (but pretty much forgettably) augmented by Kahimi Karie on vocals. I managed to miss the first half of their set, but what I heard was pretty great: the expanded line-up (up to eleven people on stage for the stuff that I saw) really rounded out the sound, especially on "Orange Was the Colour of Her Dress..." (Mingus tunes just don't sound right performed by small ensembles), and I liked the extra nuggets that were dropped into the mix when Otomo would muck with his turntables for a minute or two between songs. Having vibes, a melodica, a French horn, a trombone, a couple of saxes, and Yoshigaki's trumpet in the works made the group sound HUGE. Sachiko M even sounded funky at one point, tapping out a rhythm of sine hits to accompany the band instead of piercing the mix with longer shards. Yesterday was also the first time that I had seen or heard anything about this Alfred Harth guy. He lightened the mood considerably, clowning around with rubber tubes and mouthpiece birdcall noises, and hopping up and down while he played; I can imagine some of the too-serious fans in the audience being a bit put off by his antics. As a replacement for the perpetually schmaltzy Kikuchi, though, I was more than happy to see him bring a tenor sax and a bass clarinet into the fray: too many alto players bring cheesy "Night Moves" licks to the table, and there was definitely none of that going on. He tried the Roland Kirk thing, playing the two simultaneously, but there was so much else going on at the time that it was impossible to hear how it sounded. So... yeah, neat. I'd kill to see a similar line-up with Phew on vocals, which will apparently be doing a few shows in Europe later in the month. Unfortunately, the night was closed out by Naruyoshi Kikuchi's current endeavour, a bland piano-bass-drums-alto quartet with a "live dub" component (minimal reverb and filters, applied sparingly) and J-pop singer UA on the mic. Kikuchi's playing has always dripped with just a bit too much '80s cheese for my tastes, and the heat made UA's dragged-out attempts at sounding sultry impossible to take for more than about twenty minutes. (HINT TO PERFORMERS: When your audience is already sweating to death, don't take five minutes to run through the first eight lines of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" syllable by syllable.) They briefly sounded neat when UA and Kikuchi matched one another note for note in a slow, harmonized duet, but the vanilla summertime jazz was back a few minutes later, and Ego-Wrappin' has been doing that stuff better for years. -me