Masayuki Takayanagi and the Refusal of Jazz Comfort

The Japanese guitarist rejected tradition, turning jazz into a raw confrontation with sound itself.

To call Masayuki Takayanagi a guitarist is almost a disservice to what he did for, and to, the instrument. Across a 40-year career, he deconstructed it, remade it, and blasted it into the ether where melody, tradition and expectation went to die. In the context of 20th-century jazz and improvised music, Takayanagi occupied a zone less charted than most: an arcane frontier between free jazz, noise, and pure sonic exploration, where confusion and clarity are one. On albums like April is the crullest month and Eclipse, his work is neither easily digestible nor comfortably explained; it is music that grabs your ears and insists you listen differently.

Born on December 22, 1932, in Tokyo, Takayanagi’s earliest engagements with music were rooted in the norms of jazz performance. By the early 1950s he was already a professional, holding court in Tokyo clubs and functioning within the cool jazz lexicon — fluid, technically assured, stylistically familiar. But while many of his peers would function within traditional jazz, Takayanagi’s path was always bent toward the edge.

The key to understanding Takayanagi’s music is to appreciate the stark transition in his professional life. Picture the late 1950s Tokyo jazz scene: after bebop and cool jazz had echoed through dim club rooms and lacquered cocktail lounges, a restless Takayanagi began seeking something that couldn’t be satisfied by walking lines or fashionable chords. This was a musician who, by the end of the decade, felt the need to not only question the boundaries of jazz, but to erase them entirely.

By 1969, Takayanagi had formed what would come to be known as his landmark ensemble, New Direction — a name that hints at both hope and rupture. With bassist/composer Motoharu Yoshizawa and drummer/percussionist Yoshisaburo “Sabu” Toyozumi, Takayanagi set a manifesto for the music that would occupy the next two decades of his life. He would later expand this group into New Direction Unit, but even at the earliest moments, what happened onstage was less music in the traditional sense than sound as raw matter — a sculptural force of attack, response, reaction, and recoil. He went on to call his peers in jazz “a bunch of losers” in the press, which didn’t endear him to the heads, even as it signaled where he was going sonically.

Takayanagi’s New Direction was not polite. Nor was it melodic. It was a bloody, wide-open exploration with feedback as a leading force, where rhythm didn’t operate as a timekeeper. Watching a New Direction performance — or imagining it, if you’ve only read about it — is like observing a landscape erode: there are jagged peaks, abrasive collisions, and sudden lulls that make the noise feel alive. And the rules were audaciously simple and direct: play loud, avoid repetition, and — at least to my ear — refuse the idea of anything traditional.

If your ears are accustomed to harmony as a gentle handshake between notes, Takayanagi’s world is more like a blitzkrieg. Take the 1970 recording Independence: Tread On Sure Ground as an example: Here, the trio doesn’t build musical ideas so much as sculpt them in real time, as though each phrase is a shard of glass cutting the air. Melody is teased and oftentimes abandoned. It’s music that refuses comfort, and you feel that refusal with every resonant screech and unmoored echo. On “習作第３番アップ・アンド・ダウン | Study No.3 Up And Down,” in particular, the arrangement just sort of hangs in mid-air, a scant blend of acoustic guitar, drum taps, and upright bass never quite congealing. The same went for “ピラニア | Piranha,” the album’s percussive closing track: Over oscillating drum cymbals, Takayangi plucked the strings sporadically, blending silence and aggression until one became the other. It reminds me of Sonny Sharrock in that way; on his 1969 album Black Woman, it sounded like the guitar sat on top of the composition, trickling down occasionally to sit alongside Linda Sharrock’s voice.

Much like Sonny, Takayanagi didn’t seem interested in showing off technique for its own sake. He would sometimes drag a metal chain across strings, strike them with sticks, and lay the guitar flat on a table — a practice that would anticipate later experimental approaches by players like Keith Rowe — to free the instrument from conventional performance posture. To Takayanagi, these were auditory experiments, each technique a probe into what the guitar could do outside all preconceptions.

One of Takayanagi’s later conceptual frameworks was something he termed “non-section music,” a philosophy that rejected the melody, harmony and rhythm of traditional jazz for sounds not managed or composed in the Western sense. In rejecting such heritage, he was also rejecting the notion that music should have expectations. Because with expectation comes restraint, and he preferred something that felt unleashed. Takayanagi believed in “sound energy.” As a result, his music often felt like a cyclone: turbulent, circuitous, and intense.

To that end, the 1975 sessions for April is the crullest month aren’t songs, per se. They’re storms of the spirit: sweeping arcs of texture, abrupt blasts that feel almost volcanic, and rare interludes (like on “What Have We Given?”) where the chaos seems to take a breath to reorganize for another calculated barrage. The quartet here — Takayanagi’s guitar, Kenji Mori’s reeds and clarinets, Nobuyoshi Ino’s bass and cello, and Hiroshi Yamazaki’s percussion — don’t collaborate in the traditional sense; they occupy adjacent space. Each instrument declares its independence while being forcibly entangled with the others.

And yet, to frame Takayanagi’s music solely as destruction is reductive. Deep within the noise and the abstraction was a musician profoundly rooted in the language of jazz, even if he sought to deny it here and there. Long before he dismantled the guitar, he mastered its grammar, conducting barely perceptible homages that harkened to his formation. The idea, as he saw it, was to use history as a launchpad to the unknown, to know the past and recast it as an arbiter of chaos. To bend it, distort it, and convert it to pure audacity. Takayanagi’s influence extends far beyond the Japanese free jazz scene. Players like Keiji Haino, Otomo Yoshihide, and others in experimental noise and improvised music often cite him as a structural precursor — a musician who showed that guitar didn’t just have to be chords and solos. His methods foreshadowed different approaches in noise music, tabletop guitar experimentation, and electroacoustic improvisation, making him an understudied but towering figure in the global avant-garde. To listen to Takayanagi is to confront the image that shakes you awake.

If John Coltrane took the saxophone to the edge of spirituality, and Derek Bailey dissolved the guitar into pure radicalism, Takayanagi fused that disintegration with unmistakable depth. In the end, Takayanagi’s music compels you to face the uncharted within sound, to rethink what it means to play, to listen, and, ultimately, to experience music. And that is a legacy far louder than any amplifier feedback he ever generated.