Gene Shimosato
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November 2001

"Being an Asian-American musician has its own complexities and difficulties within the business. Hopefully, I can extract the positives of the two cultures and use it to express myself musically."

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Gene Shimosato Biography

By Wayne Zade

AAJ: Gene, I’ve been working on a series of interviews with both American and Japanese jazz musicians about jazz and Japan. Can we start our conversation with a little about your background?

GS: Yeah. The funny thing is that I experience the subject of jazz and Japan from a different angle. Although I grew up in Japan, it was inside the U.S. Air Force base, which is like growing up in America. Being an American citizen, I see myself more as an Asian-American musician, which is a different area to me than a native Japanese musician who came over to the U.S. Being an Asian-American musician has its own complexities and difficulties within the business. Hopefully, I can extract the positives of the two cultures and use it to express myself musically.

AAJ: Tell me about the kind of music you listened to when you were growing up.

GS: All kinds of American pop music and classical music. I listened to a lot of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart. Although at 6 years old, I had no clue what I was listening to. I just remember liking all kinds of music and really did not have any separate labels for them. I learned the labels much later.

AAJ: How about the indigenous music of Okinawa? Folk songs?

GS: Well, my mother is a pretty well known classical pianist and teacher in Okinawa; this is an island in southern Japan. She started giving me piano lessons when I was four, so the first music I grew up with was all the classical European repertoire that beginning pianists play. And the music I heard at home was mostly symphonic and chamber music.

The music of the island—if you know anything about the folk music of Japan—it’s very, very different from the actual Japanese traditional music of the mainland. It’s very peculiar in the sense that it’s almost jazz-like, because the Okinawan folk songs have accents on the off beats of the rhythm—it’s all two and four, really.

AAJ: It’s like syncopated.

GS: Yeah. Exactly. Very syncopated. If you’re snapping your fingers to jazz, you’ll snap them on two and four, and with Okinawan folk music, it’s the same thing. It’s very dance-oriented, people dance to it and it is very up-lifting spiritually. That was, obviously, just all around me when I was growing up—at street festivals or on any traditional holidays.

The other aspect—is because my father worked for the U.S. government at that time, I grew up on a U .S. Air Force base. He was stationed at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. So, within that community I heard all the American pop and rock and all that stuff of the day on the radio.

AAJ: Who were some of the jazz people you heard early on?

GS: The players who had the biggest effect on me early on were horn players. Coltrane, Bird, Sonny Rollins, Steve Grossman, and Wayne Shorter were some guys I liked. I played tenor saxophone in high school, so I really wanted to play like a horn on my guitar early on. However, I was playing professionally in a country-rock band back then.

That was a great opportunity for me because I didn’t know anything about country music—“the Nashville sound.” It just so happened that there weren’t that many guitar players on the island at that time. Or maybe I just got lucky. The guy who had this group—he was a Marine from Texas who had retired, and he had married a Japanese woman. He had two or three bands that worked at all the clubs. We played everyday, Monday through Sunday, and twice on weekends. I was 14 or 15 then. So I just learned to play by ear. We just played songs. Granted, they were three chords, most of the time. But it was a great experience. Since I had to play the lead guitar, between the verses, I had to play a solo, and I would just wing it and play what I was learning at the time. I was into all the rock guys, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Steve Howe—those were the guys I really liked at 14 or so. The thing is the audience really liked my playing, which gave me some confidence to keep at it.

But as far as jazz was concerned, the first jazz that I heard was by John Coltrane, believe it or not. I kind of started out hard core. The first album I listened to was Sun Ship. I thought the title was great. I still remember it, the reason being, my high school girlfriend’s father at the time was a jazz buff. He was a colonel in the Army. I would go over to their house and he had all these jazz albums. The first one that I saw was Sun Ship. I listened to that and I was blown away! That was it. I thought, “Oh, my God! What is this!” And I’ve never been the same since then.

AAJ: So you didn’t start with the early classics?

GS: No. Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck—no. Some people have gotten to jazz in a simpler way, you know? I just went from rock to Sun Ship. Of course, once I was bitten by the jazz-bug, I went back in time and checked out Charlie Christian, Louis Armstrong, Bix, Django, Duke, and all of it, you know.

AAJ: Well, a lot of people like to connect Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, suggesting that Hendrix was a jazz musician.

GS: Hmm. Yeah, I guess I’ve heard that too. I don’t think he was a jazz musician in the sense of the harmonic and improvisational vocabulary of jazz. But I think the general vibe of the band he had was a jazz trio. And a heck of a musician.

AAJ: You attended George Mason University. How did that contribute to your development?

GS: I went through American high school through the Department of Defense in Okinawa. I got a scholarship to George Mason. My father and mother split up; I was 14 years old. So my mother was left raising the kids, and it was rough. After my parent’s divorce, the U.S. government decided to kick us out all of a sudden, put us off base. Financially, we were really strapped, so I was very lucky to get a scholarship. I was able to go to the United States by myself. I left home at 17, with a guitar and that was it. There were other colleges that I was accepted to, but George Mason really was my choice. I had the scholarship and practically went for free.

AAJ: Did you know that you wanted to continue in music?

GS: Oh, yeah. I had known that I wanted to be a musician ever since I was 12, 13. I was at George Mason only a year a half, and I treasured that time because it was the first time that I met a true classical musician who knew what he was doing. I mean, my mom is great, but there’s something about your mother teaching you classical piano or something like that. But this guy was serious. He had studied with Andres Segovia, he had records out, he had a recognized name, and he was teaching at George Mason.

So I started playing classical guitar very seriously there, and I did very well there, just being in the classical music environment of Washington, D.C.

AAJ: Were you playing any jazz gigs during this time?

GS: No, not then. I was just listening. Sun Ship had messed me up. So once I got to Virginia, I was just picking a lot of other stuff, like Wes Montgomery records, Jimmy Raney records. Mostly I was doing classical guitar concerts and recitals, and going to school.

I minored in computer science. I was 17, and my mother was telling me that music was a very tough road and maybe I should have something to fall back on. I’ve always liked computers. I still do. I built my own PCs and geeked out with all those kinds of things. It kept me very busy.

So, while I was there and got more into jazz, I started feeling that George Mason was not the place for me, because, you know, I was 18 or so and the musician population of Virginia was not that large. I was starting to get some notoriety among classical student musicians and the teachers—people were writing pieces for me to play. But at that age, and the more I got into jazz, I thought I had so much more to learn. I heard about Berklee and Boston from my composition teacher who liked jazz. He also turned me on to Lenny Breau, who I think is a great guitarist.

AAJ: Berklee was my next question.

GS: I got a little uncomfortable just playing classical guitar. Classical guitar is, in a sense, a very “lonely” instrument, because most of the repertoire is just solo. You never get to play with anybody! It’s always just you, or you and the orchestra to do a concerto. Of course, there are a few cases where you get to do duets or maybe trios. You practiced alone and then you came out on the stage and played alone. Having started playing electric guitar at 14 and traveling around with bands, I kind of missed that. So my natural progression was that I got more and more into jazz, I also thought, “Why should I constantly play somebody else’s music? These guys—great composers as they are, I really don’t know who they are plus they are not even alive. I just wanted to write my own music and improvise. From hearing jazz records and knowing that the musicians mostly wrote their own pieces, originals, that was the direction I went. I guess I just wanted to play my own music with other musicians.

AAJ: When you went to Berklee, did you pick a track of study, like composing, arranging?

GS: My major at Berklee was performance. I spent my last fifty bucks trying to get a scholarship to Berklee. With that, I recorded “Themes and Variations for Guitar” by Lennox Berkeley, the great British composer. He’s written modern pieces for concert guitar, last century. I recorded that and sent it in to Berklee. They liked it enough that Down Beat and also Berklee gave me a scholarship for that tape. That was the only way I was able to go to Berklee.

AAJ: Were you working in bands in Boston while you were at Berklee?

GS: Yeah, yeah, as soon as I got there. But it took about six months to just get used to Boston and settle in. And when I got to Boston, I mean I was horrible. The musicians in Okinawa thought I was good, and the Virginia people thought the same. When I got to Boston, I thought, “Wait a minute! There are kids here who have been playing since, whatever age, and they’re incredible.” This is what I was looking for. I went there, and I was not good at all, compared to all the young musicians that I met. Some of them were like monsters at age 17 or 18.

AAJ: Yeah, it’s like the Harvard of jazz.

GS: But it was good. It kicked me into trying to get my stuff together. Eventually I ended up playing in different groups—at the Willow jazz club there, Ryles’ jazz club, the 1369—all popular then, probably closed now. Wally’s was a small hang. It used to be an historic spot—Miles, Trane played there.

AAJ: Is Boston where you met Rashied Ali?

GS: No. In Boston, I met Matthew Garrison. We became very good friends. We played a lot of gigs together. This was about the time I was going to graduate, and by then I was thinking that Boston was getting boring, New York was the place to go. I was in Boston for five or six years. I wanted to take the next step and see how well I’d do, in New York. Boston had its share of great players, like [Jerry] Bergonzi, and Mick Goodrick, a guitar player up there. Charlie Banacos is up there and I am fortunate to have taken some lessons with him.

So we took a trip. Matthew is from New York, so we went down together just to hang out and stay at his mother’s loft in Soho. We were just walking down the street and there was a guy selling records, just a street guy selling old records. This had to be fate, because we’re just walking there and we see some Trane records. So we’re going through the Coltrane records, and we saw one—I don’t remember what the name was exactly—and I didn’t have it. It had Matthew’s father, Jimmy Garrison, playing bass, as he did on so many albums, of course. And Rashied was on it. And so I say to Matt, “Hey, man, check this out! Your father is on this one!”

And the street guy selling the records overheard that and said, “You’re Jimmy Garrison’s kid? Man, Rashied lives around the corner! You should go up there and say hello.” So I’m like 22 and Matt is 18 and we’re wondering what to do. We’re thinking, shoot, man, we’ve just read about Rashied in books, we don’t know what to do. Finally, we just went over there, I’m thinking, Matt’s father had this long history with Rashied, we’d just see what he says. We found his loft and, by luck, he was there. We went inside and had a long talk. He was very interested in what we were up to, so I said I’d send him some tapes of what we were up to in Boston.

That’s how we first connected. Then we had some gigs coming up in Boston, at Ryles’ in Cambridge, one of the main clubs then. They used to have people like [Pat] Metheny, Freddie Hubbard. I asked Rashied if he wanted to be the special guest, and he was very happy to drive up to Boston and do it.

AAJ: Gene, how did you meet Ravi Coltrane?

GS: Through Rashied.

AAJ: Like “all in the family.”

GS: Yeah. After we did the gig with Rashied in Boston he said, “Man, what are you doing in Boston? You don’t need to be in Boston. You should move to New York.” Rashied convinced me to get up my courage, uproot myself, and just move down to New York. It was great. I moved down, and he’s been very helpful over the years. My first New York gig was at Condon’s with Rashied, and Reggie Workman on bass—I was ecstatic. These are historical kind of guys. Antoine Roney played tenor saxophone, and Eddie Henderson on trumpet.

AAJ: What a hell of a band.

GS: Yeah. Really put me on the spot. I was the new young kid and all that, but it went very well. I met Ravi through Rashied. Ravi has a brother who plays alto sax, Oran. I don’t think Oran is doing music anymore, but Ravi’s been doing quite well.

AAJ: I just read somewhere that Ravi put together a new selection of his father’s Impulse recordings.

GS: Yeah, Matt told me about that. There are some “live” things, with Pharaoh [Sanders]. “Live” stuff from the Harlem Cultural Center. I think that’s great for him. For somebody so humble and down-to-earth. I hope more good things happen for him.

AAJ: Have you played much in Europe?

GS: Yeah. Actually, I’ve gone to Europe quite a bit. As a matter of fact, I’ve probably done more gigs in Europe than in the U.S.

AAJ: What do you think of the audiences, the scene, there? I guess it depends on the country?

GS: For the most part, well, there are more of them! As far as the number of audiences goes. They seem to know more about the music. They’re very attentive fans. I’ve really enjoyed working in Europe.

AAJ: Do you go with American musicians or meet European musicians there?

GS: I’ve done both. On one of my last trips, I did a tour of Spain, with a rhythm section that’s very well known there. It’s a pretty common thing. Gary Bartz was doing it right before me. The hosts rotate guests. The European musicians keep working that way. They have one New York guy in the band as the headliner, and the rhythm section keeps working—piano, bass, drums.

AAJ: How about to Japan? Have you traveled back there to play too?

GS: I’ve done a major tour there; I haven’t gone there so much. When I did the recording for King Records [Prayer for September], 1995 or 96, I took a band from New York to Japan. That was a great tour because we were able to play all the big jazz festivals, and the Pit Inn.

AAJ: Was this your band, or a cooperative group?

GS: It was my band.

AAJ: And you wrote quite a bit of music on that CD.

GS: My next CD will be all original music. The next one is a release that I am going to do independently. My experience with labels is that, even with King Records, they ask to put this in and that in. They get kind of too involved with the music part of it. They want to use whatever is popular at that moment. This is pretty much true anywhere, Japan, the States. So, as far as the business aspect of music goes, I’ve seen that a lot of my peers have had much more success in going the independent route, what with the technology being available these days.

AAJ: Tell me more about the new CD itself.

GS: The current project, or the one that’s probably going to come out the earliest, is a album with Matt Garrison and myself. The concept of it is guitar, bass, and drums, with everything else that we need to do supplemented by computer. We’re shooting to complete it in March, 2002.

I’m also planning a project with Ravi. We want to follow up the previous recording [No One in Particular] with something else. So, that is going to be down the line, probably mid-2002.

The third project that I’ve been sitting on is to do a solo classical or concert guitar album, a recording of my own pieces. We’ll see how it goes. I just had arthroscopic surgery on my right wrist from a stupid motorcycle accident. Hopefully, this won’t delay it too much.

As far as the business aspect goes, all I can do is try to do my best. I’ve looked into traveling out of New York for gigs, but a lot of scenes, in the Midwest and in New Orleans, are strong with local players. And the big ticket players go through. Not being a big ticket kind of guy yet, I’m trying to do my best. My main concern is to try to put out the best music that I can, in the way that I want to. I’m 36 now. I don’t want to worry about putting this standard on the album, using this ‘flavor-of-the-week’ sideman, this and that just to please a record label. I’m too old for that now. My only concern is how can I make my music better. I feel much more empowered selling something I truly believe in than music that has been compromised for some reason.

A lot of great players have to struggle to keep it together. I supplement my income by teaching—everybody in New York does and I think this is very important. I really enjoy teaching and feel all true artists teach on one level or the other. When I first came to New York, I took a lesson from Jim Hall. Just trying to be creative and doing whatever you have to do to survive, being true to yourself. Being a musician can be very tough if you don’t really need music in your life. However, if you do, then it is the best life you can have!

I have no desire to play music I don’t like. That’s very alien to me. I just want to do my music as best I can. Luckily, it’s worked, and I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I hope it keeps going like that.