Flutist transcends tradition

In the center of the blacked-out stage of UC Irvine’s Experimental Media Performance Lab, Kojiro Umezaki stands under a spotlight. His long, lithe fingers close the holes of his shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. He takes a breath, shapes his lips to blow a note, and creates an ethereal call and response punctuated by AI-generated sonic quavers that linger over the audience.

“This notion that you can come up with a seemingly reduced idea and build complexity out of it is something that has always attracted me to the shakuhachi,” says Umezaki, a composer and UC Irvine professor of music. “It has so many constraints – it’s just a bamboo tube with five holes – but if you can start to create a sense of infinity out of that, I always felt that was where the magic happens.”

He used an original generative AI system he developed, called simerent, as an accompaniment and backdrop to his performance earlier this year, “The Ghost of Autumn Winds (秋風の).”

Simerent captures the shakuhachi’s essence, performs pattern-matching, and responds with variations on previously registered notes and passages in order of similarity, difference or both. The spatialized sounds swell like gusts of wind, with a succession of pulsed tones and pitch-bending shrieks interspersed with soft breaths.

In composing the piece, Umezaki says, he “set [it] up to be a metaphor with respect to the evolving relationship and co-dependence in our time between sentient and machine intelligence” but left room for improvisation by his instrument. “It’s always been about pushing through these boundaries that we create,” he says.

The pairing, in many ways, mirrors Umezaki’s own experience navigating his mixed identity and rejection of convention.

Born to a Japanese father and a Danish mother, he grew up in Tokyo, where, Umezaki says, he was always in a state of not knowing exactly where to place himself. In response, he turned to the shakuhachi – originally used by monks as a meditation tool – when he was 16 as a way to understand his Japanese identity. “I was horrible when I first started,” the 57-year-old says with a laugh. “My mom still likes to tell the story of my first recital, saying, ‘It looked like he was trying to make a sound, but there was no sound coming out.’

“I knew I was never going to be a traditional player because I’m not part of a hereditary lineage,” Umezaki continues. “In that sense, I felt liberated to actually play this instrument – get criticized for it – and not feel the pressure to maintain the tradition in some ways.”

Since then, his career in music has been marked by an ever-expanding range of accomplishments. For over 20 years, Umezaki performed regularly with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble. He played on the group’s Grammy Award-winning album “Sing Me Home,” as well as “A Playlist Without Borders” and “Off the Map,” and in the Grammy-nominated 2015 documentary film “The Music of Strangers.” Last year, he released the collaborative album “A Distance, Intertwined” on In a Circle Records.

Umezaki characterizes his work as an extension of UC Irvine’s integrated composition, improvisation and technology program – an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program taught by core faculty whose work embraces diverse forms of music making, challenging traditional distinctions among classical composition, computer music, improvisation and jazz. The emphasis is on innovation in all forms and on the overlap between sounds and ideas to craft projects that redefine contemporary music.

Since joining the ICIT faculty in 2008, the program’s inaugural year, Umezaki has created graduate-level courses in which students can explore how to best integrate the latest wave of AI technologies into their creative endeavors. In addition, he has added more AI material to the large-enrollment general ed course he teaches on music and technology (Music 51).

“The ICIT program’s strength comes from the diversity of practices represented across our student body,” says fourth-year doctoral student Oliver George-Brown. He’s a conceptual artist-composer who works in performance art and new media formats, combining creative and scholarly research. “This range of musical expression forces us each to be independent and confident in our own work while also encouraging us to step outside our comfort zones.”

Umezaki says he’s a proponent of the idea that traditions survive only because they continue to be remembered. He believes it’s important to have conversations with his students about the ethical considerations around change but encourages them “to dive in and don’t be afraid.”

“What I love is the fact that we can construct those boundaries but then open up pathways between [tradition and innovation] and move back and forth,” he says.

If you want to learn more about supporting this or other activities at UC Irvine, please visit the Brilliant Future website. By engaging 75,000 alumni and garnering $2 billion in philanthropic investment, UC Irvine seeks to reach new heights of excellence in student success, health and wellness, research and more. The Claire Trevor School of Arts plays a vital role in the success of the campaign. Learn more by visiting https://brilliantfuture.uci.edu/claire-trevor-school-of-the-arts/.