Otomo Yoshihide

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The Observatory's music festival Playfreely announces 2016 edition

By Daniel Peters on 8 November 2016

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Biography

Otomo Yoshihide (born August 1, 1959) is a Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist. He spent his teenage years in Fukushima, about 300 kilometers north of Tokyo. Influenced by his father, an engineer, Otomo began making electrical devices such as a radio and an electronic oscillator. In junior high school, his hobby was making sound collages using open-reel tape recorders. This was his first experience creating music. Soon after entering high school he formed a band which played rock and jazz, with Otomo on guitar. He first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the experimental rock group Ground Zero. It wasn't long, however, before he became a free jazz aficionado, listening to artists like Ornette Coleman, Erick Dolphy and Derek Bailey; and hearing music, both on disk and at concerts, by Japanese free jazz artists. The musician who influenced him most at that time was alto sax player Kaoru Abe (two of whose concerts he went to hear) and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi. For Otomo, this was a turning point--the point at which he decided to play free jazz.

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The Observatory's music festival Playfreely announces 2016 edition

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