Maestro of the Universe : African Drummers, Japanese Chants, Irish Flutes--the High-tech, High-concept music of Ryuichi Sakamoto Is All Over the Map

DINGY AND CRAMPED, UNIQUE RECORDING STUDIOS is located on the 10th floor of a corner building overlooking New York’s Broadway. On the streets outside, tourists are bustling to catch the curtain of “The Will Rogers Follies,” while hustlers of all sexes prowl for marks, and strollers check out the cheap electronics stores, porno parlors and giant neon signs that define the Great White Way.

Inside Unique’s Studio C, the swarm of humanity below does not exist. Ryuichi Sakamoto and three engineering assistants are surrounded by the remains of Chinese takeout and empty bottles of Evian water. The small room, crowded and hot, is packed with high-tech gear: a 48-track mixing board, two computers and several pieces of forbidding-looking equipment with names as arcane as their functions--midi Moog, digital sampler, ultra harmonizer, auto locater.

Sakamoto is mixing the 20-minute orchestral piece he has written for the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics. On July 25, Sakamoto will ascend a podium there to lead a symphony orchestra through the intricacies of his piece, which combines the rolling melodies of Debussy with rhythm tracks borrowed directly from African and Asian sources. In keeping with the postmodern nature of the occasion, however, the performance will be a sham. The stadium audience, and the billions watching on TV, will be hearing a prerecorded soundtrack.

“Live performance these days is like a CD show or . . . karaoke ,” he laughs.

A 40-year-old native of Japan who has lived in the United States for the past two years, Sakamoto can walk America’s streets without attracting a glimmer of recognition. But he is a big star in Japan, and well known in Europe. On the rarefied, jet-set level of international musicianship, he is a major player--in demand as film composer, record producer, actor. Sakamoto has a European classical music background, but his influences and collaborators span the globe: They are a paradigm of the sounds that are defining the rhythms of the next century--from Japan to Italy, Greece, France, America, Senegal, Brazil, Jamaica, even Burkina Faso.

Some call it World Beat or World Music. Sakamoto refers to it as Neo Geo, new geography, a musical map of the world. A similar musical mix can be heard in the work of pop stars like Sting, David Byrne and Paul Simon, but Sakamoto has taken the international groove a step further--adding elements of classical style and the avant-garde, mixing in Asian sounds, a danceable beat and a sense of attitude. His pop music is cool, hip and controlled. His film scores--for “The Last Emperor” (with David Byrne and Chinese composer Cong Su), “The Sheltering Sky,” “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and “High Heels”--mix lush melodies with disparate cultural and technological elements. He is a polymath of international sound.

Sakamoto’s listening preferences follow this eclectic pattern. He likes Byrne and Soul II Soul, and digs house music bands like A Tribe Called Quest as much as the later works of Franz Liszt. He has taken this artistic gumbo and incorporated it into his work. In the late 1970s, he co-founded a techno-pop band called the Yellow Magic Orchestra that mixed robotic, Germanic rhythms with an Asian sensibility. He used Chinese motifs in his Oscar-winning score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” and has included everything from African drummers to Arabic chants in other symphonic works. His pop compositions run from disco to punk to a strange meld of Japanese chants with hard-edged techno-pop beats.

The Earth may be breaking up into smaller and smaller political units, but Ryuichi Sakamoto is at the very center of a global musical convergence. It’s all Neo Geo. And for Sakamoto, musical nirvana is a simple concept: “If I ever saw a musical band with an African musician, an Indian percussion player, a Japanese singer and an Irish flute player,” he says, “all together, doing one music, contributing to that music, I’d cry.”

SAKAMOTO IS A SLIM, MEDIUM-SIZED MAN who favors stylish, European-cut clothes. His thin, angular face and sexy, heavy-lidded expression, though not strikingly handsome in person, photograph extremely well. His looks and sense of style have made him a sought-after presence in Japanese commercials and earned him key acting roles in “The Last Emperor” and Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.”

Sakamoto keeps musician’s hours--mid-afternoon until whenever. He’s not a party animal, just a hard worker who prefers the solitude of the evening hours. After a very late night, he drifted into the studio at 6 p.m., dressed in a rust-colored turtleneck, brown cotton pants, light brown ankle-high shoes and brown and white argyle socks.

Listening to a playback of the recorded track, he displays a nervous energy, a physical restlessness, that defines his personal style. Pacing anxiously as the music plays, he occasionally steps to the mixing console to fiddle with dials and switches. He’ll brush his hair back from his face, or, in unconscious imitation of a model at a fashion shoot, hold it in place on top of his head. Every once in a while he’ll smile, pretend to conduct, or click his teeth to re-create a particular percussive sound. He smokes incessantly from a pack of Marlboro Lights. But he’s also low-key and egalitarian, listening carefully to his assistants’ comments and suggestions, directing the proceedings with softly worded orders and infinite calm.

“He’s very spontaneous and playful, and has no genre prejudices,” says Arto Lindsay, a New York-based musician and composer who has worked on several of Sakamoto’s solo albums. “He mixes and matches all kinds of styles without regard to whether or not it makes sense to match those styles, as if they have no history. He can write really simple pop, but he loves complex and groundbreaking music, and balances those in an interesting way.”

Critics have been generally positive about his work, but Sakamoto’s eclectic nature has its downside. His penchant for merging wildly different styles and techniques practically guarantees that some songs will fail, though his multicultural experiments tend to be more successful than his often-formulaic straight pop tunes. As producer Bill Laswell, who worked on Sakamoto’s 1987 “Neo Geo” album, says, Sakamoto’s strength is “repetitive themes that can be juxtaposed with a lot of different situations. It works fairly well with film.”

Still, Sakamoto was respected in the music world before his Oscar for “The Last Emperor” became what he calls “a big-name card to make contacts.” Before the award, many of his projects were self-generated. After it, he could wait for the phone to ring.

Since “Emperor,” he has been on an endless treadmill of work and travel. During the last five years he has released two solo albums, embarked on a worldwide tour, composed the scores for Bertolucci’s “The Sheltering Sky,” Volker Schlondorff’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Pedro Almodovar’s “High Heels” and a new film version of “Wuthering Heights.” He also composed for the Olympics, and will write the music for “Wild Palms,” a new TV series produced by Oliver Stone.

It’s been a brutal schedule for Sakamoto, who has been racking up the frequent flyer mileage as he jets between Tokyo, London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and points in-between. Two years ago, tired of the exhausting return trips to Japan, he moved his family to New York, “the center of the world.”

SAKAMOTO HAS BEEN MARRIED to Akiko Yano, a pop singer and pianist, since 1982. They live in Scarsdale, an upscale suburb of New York, with Miu, their 11-year-old daughter, and Futa, Yano’s 17-year-old adopted son from a previous marriage (Sakamoto has an 18-year-old daughter who lives in Japan).

Both parents are frequently on the road. Since their children do not travel with them, they arrange their schedules so at least one will be home at any given time. To ensure a sense of normalcy, they refuse to allow the press into their home. “I don’t want my kids to say to their friends, ‘Hey, my dad is a big star,’ ” says Sakamoto. “We want our kids to be normal.”

Not that Ryuichi Sakamoto was ever a particularly “normal” child. He was, he says, a cross between a hippie and a punk. As a high school student, he wore shoulder-length hair, high-top basketball shoes, blue jeans, sunglasses, tie-dyed shirts and a raincoat.

In the late 1960s, he attended a prestigious public school in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, a neighborhood “like the streets of the film ‘Blade Runner.’ ” Sakamoto and a small group of friends, the hippest of the hip from a number of schools, would cruise Shinjuku regularly. They’d try to pick up girls, attend anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, go to jazz clubs and listen to records by John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Once, inspired by student riots that had broken out at almost every Japanese university, he and his classmates built a barricade in the principal’s office and shut their school down. The institution was closed for four weeks as students and teachers negotiated a settlement that included the abolition of exams and school uniforms.

He wasn’t raised to be rebellious. But from an early age, he knew he was different. His parents encouraged it in him--and he liked it. An only child, he grew up in a middle-class, artistically inclined family. His father was an editor who worked on Yukio Mishima’s first novel, “Confessions of a Mask.” His mother was a women’s hat designer whose pieces were sold to boutiques and stage productions. His mother and one of her brothers played piano, so Ryuichi was exposed to Mozart and Bach at an early age. He began taking piano lessons at 3; even though he hated to practice, he was writing his own compositions by the time he was 10.

Sakamoto grew up in an era when American pop culture dominated Japan. He watched American TV programs (he can still hum the theme from “Combat”), attended American films (“The Alamo” is the first big movie he remembers), and played with American toys (G.I. Joe was a favorite).

By the time he entered high school, the pop music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones was all the rage. But Sakamoto’s curiosity, spurred by boredom with his classical training, took him far beyond the worlds of Hollywood and rock ‘n’ roll. He developed an interest in avant-garde composers like John Cage and began attending the conceptual, left-wing films of Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

“They destroyed classical rules and concepts,” he says. “I was taking more traditional European composing and piano classes, and they had all these rules, foreign rules. People like Cage let music and art be free.”

Sakamoto was still attending weekly piano and composition classes, but he was as bored as ever. He and a few friends formed a small jazz band that played bossa nova tunes and Miles Davis standards for school audiences. Prowling around town, looking for the latest jazz gigs and mixed media shows, he was searching for an intellectual openness he couldn’t find at school.

This search for freedom led Sakamoto into a brief flirtation with radical politics. But by the time he entered the University of Art of Tokyo in 1970, left-wing influence had begun to wane in Japan. During the next six years, he studied electronic and international ethnic music, worked as a session musician and dabbled in experimental theater. Yet when he received his master’s degree in composition in 1976, he was still restless, searching for something to devote his talents to.

In the late 1970s, Sakamoto despaired at the course of contemporary music. The energy of the British invasion and the psychedelic era had dissipated into the sterility of disco. Sakamoto thought rock was dead. But then he heard a German band named Kraftwerk.

Kraftwerk popularized techno-pop, combining a rhythmic beat with synthesized music and droning, robotic vocals. In performance, the group’s cold persona was the antithesis of rock’s anarchy and disco’s sensuality.

“They were like a new kind of human being,” he says. “They acted and looked like that, very futuristic. It was the minimalist music of the time, and it was totally new. It wasn’t free--it was cold, no emotion, no feeling, something not human. A computer-composed music.” Flushed with the magic of Kraftwerk, Sakamoto and two friends formed the Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978. YMO copied the German band’s machine-like attitude, but added an Eastern flavor. The group often sang in an emotionless English that was nearly indecipherable and dressed in costumes meant to satirize the cliched image of Asian music: traditional Chinese dress, a strait-laced Japanese businessman look, even Michael Jackson-like faux military get-ups.

YMO was an immediate success, proof that musical boundaries were crashing down all over the world--the band was a precursor of Neo Geo. In 1980, when YMO embarked on a world tour, it had two albums on the Japanese Top 10, a single making waves in American discos and a sheaf of gushing press clippings from music magazines in Europe and the States.

But being in a band was constricting Sakamoto’s musical ideas. In order to work with fellow band members Yukihiro Takahashi and Haruomi Hosono, he had to submerge his individuality into a collective ego. This frustrated Sakamoto; he searched for independent musical ideas when he recorded the two solo albums he released during this period. “I was deliberately looking for things that were more avant-garde,” he says.

Creative tensions eventually led to YMO’s breakup in 1983--no tragedy for Sakamoto, who emerged from its rubble with world-class connections and chops.

The same year, Sakamoto was asked by one of his boyhood idols, Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, to act in a World War II film called “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” Sakamoto agreed to appear as a prison camp commandant if he could also compose the film’s score. The result, which he says is his favorite work, was a dazzling combination of synthesized music, traditional Japanese instrumentation and Asian rhythmic patterns. It was as if he had introduced lotus gardens and jasmine tea into the brutality of the Pacific war.

After “Mr. Lawrence,” Sakamoto’s career took off. He established a publishing company that has produced several books of his dialogues with Japanese musicians and philosophers, collaborated on an album for pop star Thomas Dolby, composed music for performance artist Molissa Fenley, composed the soundtracks for “Kitten Story,” a Japanese family film, and for “Royal Space Force,” an animated feature. His newest album, “Heartbeat,” is due out next month.

Sakamoto’s almost obsessive desire to move from project to project is the mark of an extremely restless talent. He may not be a bored prodigy anymore, but he’s just as itchy. Contentment is creative death. Stability equals sterility. Which is probably why the studio, with its myriad high-tech possibilities, is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s natural turf.

MIDNIGHT IN STUDIO C, AND another Chinese meal has been devoured. It’s been a frustrating, monotonous evening. For the past five hours, Sakamoto has been undergoing the aural equivalent of root canal surgery--he’s trying to match a live orchestral recording to a computer-generated rhythm track. The same 15-second tape loop has been playing over and over as Sakamoto and his assistants work out a problem peculiar to the digital age. The computer track is perfect, precisely because it is computer-made. But the live track is imperfect, off a beat here or there. The problem of mixing and matching these tracks represents, in microcosm, the perils and possibilities of the computerized recording studio.

“I’m hoping that electronics will bring us more freedom,” says Sakamoto, “but I can’t tell if it’s realistic or not. There are simply too many possibilities. Sometimes musical freedom comes from limited situations. Like (guitarist) Ry Cooder. All he’s got is a guitar and a bottleneck, but what he creates with that, it’s total freedom to me. I’m trying to get that freedom from the electronics.”

This is where Sakamoto and the future truly converge. He is creating musical paths and precedents for the new century. Sakamoto and his peers are like 19th-Century explorers who ventured into the interior of Africa without a map to guide them.

“Until you have a reference point, or something to look back to, you’re always slipping and sliding with electronics,” says Bill Laswell. “It’s changing all the time.”

Sakamoto worries that technology can take over the creative process. Machines become the be-all and end-all, music a function of floppy disks and artificial sound--as robotic as a Kraft-werk performance. Sakamoto thinks that when he plays solo piano his music may be better, because it’s more personal. He fears that when he’s in the studio he’s thinking more about the electronics than the groove.

Arto Lindsay thinks Sakamoto shouldn’t be concerned. “Ryuichi’s really fascinated with technology,” he says, “but ultimately he’s more into the music than the machines. He likes to find a great sound, in a kind of found-object sort of way, like Marcel Duchamp, as opposed to spending hours creating sounds on a synthesizer.”

Truth be told, Sakamoto likes it in there, in that soundproofed room surrounded by his toys, his assistants and his thoughts. Machines don’t talk back, and there are no language problems, like there are with live musicians.

But neither do they radiate the glamour, the charisma, that fuels a live performance, especially a Sakamoto performance.

On his last world tour, for the 1990 “Beauty” album, Sakamoto fronted an eclectic nine-piece band featuring English, American, Brazilian and Okinawan musicians. A video released after the tour shows him in fine form: dressed in an impeccably styled white suit and shirt combination, thick black hair swept back off his face, he looks absolutely gorgeous, as if he had just stepped out of an ad for Jean-Paul Gaultier, one of his favorite fashion designers.

Yet the band’s music, as stylized as Sakamoto’s dress, is also passionate. It’s drum and percussion heavy, definitely danceable. But a number of tunes play off of rhythmic Japanese chants to create a sound that is uniquely Sakamoto. And its leader shows that he is no longer a YMO automaton as he bounces in his seat at the keyboards, claps his hands to the beat and dances around the stage.

Still, Sakamoto says tours are worth it only if he can work with the best musicians, and “there are only a few great musicians, and I can’t always get them.”

But he can always get studio time, and a new digital toy, and plumb the depths of his creativity. “I think in the future he’ll continue to play a number of roles,” says Lindsay, “but he’ll probably have more influence through his pop records, because they’re full of great ideas.”

Well, maybe. Ryuichi Sakamoto is facing the millennium with an itch he can’t seem to scratch. He’s got all that equipment. He’s got all those ideas. And he’s soaked up all those Neo Geo influences. What’s he gonna do with them?

“I’d like to write an opera,” he laughs. “I used to hate operas. I just hated them. Now I’m getting to know them. And I’m going to appreciate them.”

Lettering by Margo Chase Design.