Gig review: Kazuki Tomokawa, CCA, Glasgow

MARGINAL not so much in its formal concepts as in the fact it was performed entirely in Japanese, the music of alternative folk musician Kazuki Tomokawa was a prime example of the sounds Glasgow’s new Counterflows festival of alternative music has been set up to promote.

The 62-year-old Tomokawa, although an artist of some underground repute in his homeland for the past 40 years, is a largely unknown quantity in the UK, his only previous appearance on these shores having been at Stirling’s Counterflows precursor Le Weekend nine years ago.

Appearing on the same bill as Berlin chanteuse Margareth Kammerer and Falkirk’s dependable alternative muso Bill Wells and his National Jazz Trio of Scotland, Tomokawa was an ungrudgingly hard nut to crack. He wore a black suit, T-shirt and trilby and a pair of attention-grabbing green running shoes, and almost every word he uttered was in Japanese, commencing each song with its grunted title and only occasionally lapsing into halting English, for example a taciturn “30 minutes, OK” at the timecheck prompting of his busy runner. It was hard, under the circumstances, not to fear that those of us not fluent in the language were missing out on an important but unlockable part of the performance.

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The slow-burn success of the show, however, was in the gradual realisation that Tomokawa’s lyrics, as eloquent as they may be, couldn’t match the fierce, guttural power of his voice itself. Backed by only his own unflashy acoustic guitar, he delivered lines with a cracking cough here and a machine-gun rattle there, a fiercely distinctive experience of the kind Counterflows will hopefully supply much more of in future.

Rating: ****

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