Makoto Kawashima

Makoto Kawashima

Over the last decade Makoto Kawashima has emerged as one of the most original improvisers in a new generation of Japanese players. His releases on his own Homosacer label as well as on what would be the final album released by P.S.F. Records reveal a haunting and impassioned style of playing, bursting with brutality and virtue, two key foundations of Japanese free jazz. Kawashima was born in 1981 in Saitama, a prefecture of the Greater Tokyo Area, but it wasn’t until 2008 that he first picked up the alto saxophone, electing to perform primarily in a solo configuration since 2010. Following the tradition of alto forebears Kaoru Abe and Masayoshi Urabe, he recorded his 2015 record Homo Sacer for P.S.F. Records. Its publication and recent reissue by Black Editions have represented something of a passing of the free improvisation torch, with the session boasting an impassioned performance by Kawashima using one of Kaoru Abe’s reeds given to him by the latter’s mother. Leaping between subdued lyrical lamentations and insistent trills, Kawashima leaves ample negative space for his dizzying screeches into the void.