BIGYUKI, real name Masayuki Hirano, is a Japanese keyboardist and songwriter. His extensive vocabulary fuels his ability to create an entirely new sound by infusing elements of jazz, classical, hip-hop, soul, rock, dance, and electronica into his compositions. BIGYUKI’s debut full-length album, Reaching for Chiron is a perfect synthesis of heart and technology, with heavy beats and buoyant melodies. The release was hailed by WBGO as ‘sonically immersive ‘” a celestial strain of synth jazz.’ DJ Mag and PopMatters also praised the album, calling it ‘sonically kaleidoscopic’ and ‘infectiously interesting.’ BIGYUKI brings these compositions to life onstage in dynamic performances with a bassist and drummer at his side.
Classically trained at Berklee College of Music, BIGYUKI has gone on to cultivate a unique musical identity that has attracted the attention of fellow artists Q-Tip, Bilal, Talib Kweli, Harvey Mason, Marcus Strickland, Mark Guiliana, Me’Shell Ndegeocello, and more. His work is featured on J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only and A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here’¦Thank You 4 Your Service.
Hirono is not the standard product of 21st century "jazz school", although he did go to the Berklee College of Music—the classic jazz bro training ground of years past. He grew up in Japan, where his musical preparation was almost exclusively Western classical.
"How I developed my sound is weird and unique. I wasn't a B-boy when I got to Berklee. Even jazz was new to me. I had classical technique. But I didn't really have the will to be a classical musician."
Why go to Berklee if you aren't particularly interested in jazz or American pop styles? Hirono explains that, mainly, he was seeking new horizons. "I wanted to leave Japan and gain a new view, see myself from a new perspective. My parents had both lived in the US and wanted me to go. I used my classical technique to get me out. Berklee was known in Japan, and I got a scholarship."
At Berklee, Hirano was the ultimate rookie, hearing pop music for the first time. In the beginning, he immersed himself in jazz piano, but he couldn't swing. "I loved Oscar Peterson, Kenny Barron, Phineas Newborne, Jr. I was this annoying kid who always wanted to play with people, 'Let's jam, play with me!' I'd play the bass part for them so they could jam. That's how I got playing bass lines. Then I got into organ jazz, playing walking bass lines with my left hand. I was intimidated about asking bass players to play, but I got to playing with drummers."
Obsessing over the organ led Hirono to gospel music. "I started from the '50s or the '60s and had to work my way forward. Obsessing over bass lines led Hirono, soon enough, to classic funk music, for example Maceo Parker's Life on Planet Groove(1992). This brought him in short order to hip-hop. "I heard a sample of a groove that I loved from Maceo." It sounds as if BigYuki got an accidental education in black American music over the course of just a few years.
The music on the BigYuki debut doesn't much sound like any of that music: jazz piano or organ jazz or James Brown-inspired/Maceo Parker music. But you can hear that trail of all this music lurking behind BigYuki's conception.
Much of the album consists of soundscapes that are infectiously interesting, ones that shift over time almost the way a jazz improvisation does, with motifs recurring and mutating. "Burnt N Turnt" begins as pure sound texture, but it brings in a toggling five-note lick that swings and hops, linking everything else together. While are no improvisations or "solos" in the tradition of jazz, blues, and rock, BigYuki has composed the performance so that synthesizers jump into with interludes that sound like big band saxophone sections or like the keyboard lines from the classic '70s Herbie Hancock fusion records. Sample voices shout, synth percussion marches and grooves, sirens wail.
BigYuki was starting to get into this kind of music as early as Berklee. "I got into synthesizers. Playing with a band, I would hear what's happening and then come up with ideas that could add to the music as an extra layer. But my goal was to come up something that was so hooky that people couldn't hear the music without it."
Ultimately, this meant that BigYuki became a partner to artists of all kinds. Indeed, two years ago, he worked with A Tribe Called Quest on their last recording. He's credited as a composer, for example, on "Melatonin", laying in spacey synth playing beneath Q Tip's rapping and vocals from Abbey Smith. How did he get that gig? "When I got to New York from Boston, my first big gigs were playing with Bilal. I think I excelled at quickly coming up with ideas and developing the right sound for a situation. And this skill worked really well in hip-hop. Then I was playing with Talib Kweli. It got noticed."
On his debut, BigYuki works with Chris Turner on "Eclipse", a modern soul tune has a traditional verse/chorus even though its otherwise a hip-hop tune in textures and approach. Bilal is featured on vocals for "Soft Places", and rapper Javier Starks is front and center on "Simple Like You". Across all these pieces, BigYuki constructs a soundscape and moves it around with creativity. "Simple Like You", for example, shifts between a staccato dance groove to a section orchestrated with string sounds that floats in time.
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日本、〒949-6212 新潟県南魚沼郡湯沢町三国２０２ Map
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