Artist Profile: Paul Kikuchi
February 2011, Vol. 27, No. 2

Photo by Daniel Sheehan

By Schraepfer Harvey

While an undergrad, Paul Kikuchi found himself hooked to an electrocardiograph device in Milford Graves’s basement in Queens. Graves’s customized sensors clung to Kikuchi’s body and gave signals of the sound and rhythm of his heartbeat as he worked through traditional bata rhythms. Graves was monitoring how the rhythms affected the heart in a process he developed in that basement. For Graves, these rhythms of the heart were a source for improvisations, a musical clue into heart health, and a tool for music therapy with the addition of acupuncture needles. The experience stuck with Kikuchi.

The Seattle-based percussionist, composer, instructor, instrument builder, and practitioner of Feldenkrais recounted the experience for me over the phone. He tells me that one of the impressive qualities about Graves is that he embodies so much of what he does, who he is, that you can’t even ask about motivation. “He’s living the work fully … that’s inspiring to me,” Kikuchi says.

Kikuchi sought out the rhythm great at the suggestion of Gregg Keplinger, who helped set Kikuchi up with his earliest drum kit. Kikuchi was able to cultivate the Graves mentorship throughout his undergrad years at Bennington College in Vermont, where Graves is a professor. He says, “There’s something about the lineage in jazz music … I sought out players of the lineage I want to tap into.”

From Bennington College, that search for legacy learning brought Kikuchi back west after a year abroad in Budapest, Hungary, to pursue a master of fine arts in the California Institute of the Arts African American Improvisational Music program led by Wadada Leo Smith, of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). His is a unique program focused on improvisation, immersion, collaboration, and creating performing musicians with a bent toward the interdisciplinary arts.

Emphasis from that program, and from Kikuchi choosing a particular jazz lineage, can certainly be seen in the branches of Kikuchi’s artistry. He performs in multiple projects; he’s the artistic director and founder of his own recording company, Prefecture Records; he’s held residencies at Centrum near Port Townsend and at the Montalvo Arts Center in California; he’s a talented award and grant winner, an educator, composer, instrument inventor and builder; and he’s a practitioner of Feldenkrais, a gentle physical therapy intended to enhance function, coordination, and physical awareness, welcome abilities for musicians and artists, Kikuchi’s preferred clients. “It’s an ever-changing path,” he says. “I just try to keep going. Projects that happen can seem defining … but that’s one aspect of my creative output.” Many of today’s creators, individual artists and collaborators, like Kikuchi, do see a place in the jazz lineage, one place out of many. “If you’re open,” Kikuchi says, “the path is malleable.”

Some of the collaborators on a similar path work directly with Kikuchi: Empty Cage Quartet, for example, is a fresh sounding band of CalArts alumni with a dynamic redolent of that Graves and Leo Smith lineage. They performed recently in the Is That Jazz? Festival at the Chapel Performance Space and have releases on Portugal’s Clean Feed label.

Kikuchi’s among like-minded creators, too, in the Toy Boats, a playful quartet including Tiffany Lin, whose piano deconstruction-reconstruction project This Old Piano was featured in March 2010 of City Arts magazine. The Toy Boats quartet will be performing at the Gallery 1412 on February 5.

Other notable collaborations are his Portable Sanctuary project, an ensemble featuring Kikuchi’s compositions and invented sculptural percussion instruments, and an effort with local sax improviser Wally Shoup that explores Kikuchi’s interest in site-specific improvisation. Their duo collaboration is a Prefecture Records production currently available as online video via YouTube or Vimeo: give a search for “Kikuchi Cascade Tunnel.”

Kikuchi’s recent Prefecture release with his percussion duo, Open Graves, marks a further continuity of lineage through an inter-generational artistry. The recording includes Bay-area percussionist and fellow Bennington alumnus Jesse Olsen and, instead of Shoup, the record features renowned sound artist Stuart Dempster, whose work in Deep Listening parallels Kikuchi’s current work in the realm of site-specific music.

Kikuchi’s oeuvre currently features site-responsive projects. It’s a fascination that began for the artist when he was a teen on the peninsula. Born in Indianola, Kikuchi came to drums when a friend needed a timekeeper to fill out the garage band. The teens took to some clandestine exploring of the sonic qualities of the abandoned cisterns and bunkers Fort Worden. Today, that recent Open Graves release, Flight Patterns: it was recorded in the two-million-gallon Dan Harpole cistern at Fort Worden, named for the prominent arts advocate and available for rent through Centrum. The recording arena is bizarre, sure, but its forty-five second reverberation time allows Kikuchi to explore tonality, resonance, and stretching the rhythmic time through natural reverberation in a space; it allows him to involve the space as an instrument. “It’s not how you play [drums] in your living room,” he says. “You have to slow down. I like that quality.”

He continues these explorations of acoustic space this winter on vibraphone at Seattle’s Union Station, preparation for a piece in development to debut later this year.

That work is funded by the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, one of Kikuchi’s recent sources for artistic support.* Others sources include Artist Trust, Chamber Music America, 4Culture, American Composers Forum, and the Jack Straw Foundation. Kikuchi tells me, “in trying to survive as an artist … I feel lucky that I come naturally to writing and applying for grants, but I’m not always happy about the time spent [at that effort].” Not a surprising notion from Kikuchi, who wants to bring music out of the concert venue, away from the desk, and into life, he says.

The surprise of onlookers contains much of the joy from his bringing music to unexpected places in life, Kikuchi says. It’s present in his sound work at Union Station, and further present in the mobile Balkan-esque marching troupe Orkestar Zirkonium, in which Kikuchi plays various rhythmic roles: snare, dumbek. The group can sometimes be found marching from pub to pub, with gusto, to boot. Listen for them during the Nick Cave sound suit invasion at the Seattle Art Museum on the March 10, an Art of Jazz presentation.

Indeed the quality of sound in a room or surroundings is paramount to a musician, just as is his quality of life. This is why Kikuchi has tapped into a lineage that values that kind of holistic exploration; it’s why he takes his own time in the spaces of the Northwest and elsewhere to bring music to life.

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*In addition to support from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, Kikuchi's Union Station project receives funding from 4 Culture and Sound Transit. Earshot Jazz regrets the omission.