Millions know his Oscar-winning film music. He was a forefather of techno, but also played jazz, pop and avant-garde. Now Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose music is better known to many than his name, is dead.
The great Japanese film composer, musician, actor and producer Ryuichi Sakamoto (“The Last Emperor”) is dead. Sakamoto, who once starred opposite David Bowie in the war film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983), died after a long time suffering from cancer last Tuesday, as his office announced on Sunday. The musical genius was 71 years old.
Although his music might be better known in the West than his name, for decades he was not only immensely respected but also a great inspiration to many artists. Starting with his work in the 70s and 80s as the bandleader of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, which was once counted among the “Kings of Techno” with the German band Kraftwerk, to his deeply emotional, Grammy and Oscar-winning film scores and his numerous electronic solo experiments.
Oscar for the soundtrack to “The Last Emperor”
“I’m a hunter,” Ryuichi Sakamoto once told the German Press Agency in New York, where he lived for many years. “I chase music all over the world.” Whether pop, rock, ambient, techno or jazz, whether African drum rhythms, Asian folk songs or melodies from German classics – the brilliant musician repeatedly showed new artistic facets in his works, with which he wrote music history for decades. In the course of his long career, Sakamoto has worked with many important artists, including Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, David Sylvian and David Byrne. With the latter he recorded the soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”, for which both received an Oscar in 1988.
“I vividly remember the emotional experience I had when I first heard Ryuichi Sakamoto,” said in an interview Alejandro González Iñárritu, acclaimed director of films like The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, for which Sakamoto composed the film music. “I wanted someone who could understand silence. And that’s Ryuichi,” the American radio network npr quoted the director as saying. “I was stuck in a traffic jam with a friend in a car in Mexico City and we put on a pirated Japanese tape — it was 1983. I heard some piano notes and felt like the fingers were going into my brain and giving me a cosmic head massage … and it said “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,”” Iñárritu recalled, according to npr.
Sakamoto achieved world fame when he joined the Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late ’70s. The Japanese became one of the toughest techno musicians in the world at the time. They were “stormy years,” Sakamoto later recalled. “But in the long run, pop and rock alone are only for people who have little musical education and don’t want to learn anything new,” he said at the age of 50.
He was inquisitive and eager to experiment
But Sakamoto, who was born near Tokyo on January 17, 1952 as the son of a publishing manager and a hat designer, was certainly not one of them. He learned to play the piano when he was a little boy. He studied composition in the Japanese capital. His first album Thousand Knives, a mix of electropop, jazz and experimental music, was released when he was 26.
Sakamoto, who played in jazz bands when he was still at school, experimented extensively with electronic sound generators and researched the musical traditions and peculiarities of Third World countries. It was because of his unbridled curiosity and love of experimentation that almost every one of his records sounded different from the earlier ones. In addition, the Japanese wrote the music for numerous films, including Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Story of the Servant”.
One of his beliefs was that peoples can come to a better understanding through the exchange of their music. With his interest in environmental and peace issues, he was also involved in the anti-nuclear movement. After the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011 as a result of an earthquake and tsunami, he called on his country to phase out nuclear power. Vain.
“How many times will I see the full moon?”
In 2014, Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer. After the cancer initially seemed defeated, his doctors diagnosed rectal cancer in 2021. Sakamoto had to undergo surgery to remove the cancer that had spread to both lungs, as he revealed in Japanese literary magazine Shincho.
The article was followed by a series of essays entitled “How Often Will I See the Full Moon?” about his musical career and his views on life. Opening the way, he said: “Having made it this far in life, I hope to be able to make music until my last moment, like Bach and Debussy, who I adore.” For his 71st birthday, his experimental solo album “12” was released in March 2021 while Sakamoto was undergoing cancer treatment. (dpa)