Watanabe: Point Man for Japan’s Fusion Foray in U.S. : Pop: The guitarist is a technical marvel who is having an impact on young players.

The Japanese are coming! The Japanese are coming!

What’s that? A little late, you say? They’re already here?

Well, maybe when it comes to cars and videos and cameras and computers, but jazz fusion? Can it be that the celebrated Japanese capacity to create copies that are better than the original also applies to contemporary improvisation?

Guitarist Kazumi Watanabe thinks the answer is yes. And he’s got the earlier track record of such performers as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe (no relation), Tiger Okoshi and Sleepy Matsumoto, as well as the prospective emergence of a host of new young players to prove his point.

Watanabe, who performs at At My Place in Santa Monica tonight with his trio, is a technical marvel, the kind of high-voltage performer who draws crowds of young guitarists to all his gigs.

“He’s already a major influence,” said Jim Snowden, president of Mesa/Blue Moon Records, the company that releases Watanabe’s Gramavision recordings. “He may not be well known yet to the larger pop audience, but you can bet he’s having an impact on a bunch of young players.”

Watanabe, himself, is a bit more modest about his expectations, despite having been chosen Guitarist of the Year nine times by Japan’s “Swing Journal.”

“Audiences in Tokyo and Osaka are about the same as audiences in the United States,” he said last week. “They want to hear good music with a lot of improvisation. My kind of playing has more followers in Japan than here, but it’s not a big as Michael Jackson. For me, the size of the audience doesn’t matter. The important thing is just to be able to play my music, anywhere.”

Born in Tokyo in 1953, Watanabe started out on piano at the age of 12, but soon switched instruments. “I was around 14” he said, “when I heard a friend of mine playing guitar. As soon as I heard it I said to myself, ‘This is it! This is for me!’ ”

By the time he was 17, Watanabe’s skills, already remarkable, were displayed on his first recording. A host of releases followed, and by the early ‘80s, he was recording with the likes of Marcus Miller, Omar Hakim, David Sanborn and Michael Brecker.

“He’s really a musician’s musician,” said Snowden. “But the thing that makes him so special is that, even with all the power he generates from his guitar, he’s a beautiful melodic player, as well.”

It’s taken Watanabe a while to reach the maturity of tempering his electronic wizardry with the more subtle powers of his native tradition.

“When I started to play rock and jazz,” he said, “I thought only about Western music. I didn’t listen to Japanese music at all. But now, for the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about where I come from, about the music of my country. Japanese music has a very large range, and now I try to bring some of that to my playing.”

Other Japanese musicians have followed a similar path. Many of Toshiko Akiyoshi’s best compositions, for example, blend Eastern scales with Western rhythms. Keiko Matsui, a younger keyboardist-composer, has managed to find a surprisingly convincing linkage between rhythm & blues, rock and jazz improvisation, while the group Hiroshima (from Hawaii) has long included a koto as part of its basic sound patterns.

Frank Becker, an American composer who lived in Japan for nearly fifteen years, feels that this process of cultural transformation is common to Japanese artists as they interface with Western influences.

“Anything that comes into Japan,” he said, “jazz, rock, contemporary classical, whatever, first gets lost in murkiness and then is accepted into the culture. Then, slowly, it finally comes out as something Japanese.

“You can’t just bring something in and have it be accepted as it is. It must first come in, go through a metamorphosis and then emerge as something Japanese. They kind of reinvent the thing and in the process make it their own. I mean, it’s the same thing they’ve done with cars and stereos.”

Is it really too far-fetched, then, to expect a wave of improvisational performers such as Watanabe to come pouring across the Pacific in the ‘90s? Probably so. Making music, after all, is not quite the same as producing an efficient turbocharged engine.

But if the playing of Watanabe is any indication, Japan will certainly be providing a healthy share of the music that closes out the century. Because, like all artists, the essence of his work transcends its cultural source.

“One of my goals,” Watanabe said, “is to find a key that will open the box of the mysteries of the world. You know, music has many different chambers and places. I think that the answers to all the questions--like ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What is life about?’--can be found in music.

“To me, music isn’t just an empty diversion. To me, it’s the key to the universe.”