Metamorphosis

Crossover albums don't often get one's pulse racing, and only two tracks on this album from the Japanese American koto player Kurosawa move beyond the ordinary: ‘Mandala’, commissioned for the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery, which takes us into a contemplative place full of contrasts, and an update of Kurosawa's first-acknowledged composition, ‘Inner Space’, which mercifully omits the otherwise omnipresent violin and percussion to leave the iconic Japanese koto somewhere approximating the territory of a Celtic harp.

There are some creative moments, including musical pictures of bustle in downtown New York (‘Oneday Monday’) and snapshots of a journey through South America (‘Journey’), but the adoption of Middle Eastern soundworlds in ‘New Land Found’ seems naïve. Any crossover needs to avoid common-denominator fusions, but in Metamorphosis the world of Japan seems to be a distant memory.

The inclusion of tabla, darbuka, and Latin percussion are decorative rather than anything new, and the shakuhachi in ‘Restless Dawn’ is largely wasted as it plays in unison with the violin. Most tracks adopt familiar metric formulations, with vamps and ostinati supporting quasi-extemporised melodies. It is, then, hard to justify the album note claim that Kurosawa ‘renews a 1,300-year-old musical tradition, weaving… forms … to create something entirely new.’