Thirteen Years of Guitar Lessons Ending in Bach, and a Student Who Refused to Play Guitar in Public

Kazuo Imai was born in Kawasaki on September 24, 1955, and spent thirteen years learning guitar from a man he was determined not to sound like. He enrolled at the Yamaha Jazz School in September 1972; after two years his instructor, Masayuki Takayanagi — Japanese free jazz's most uncompromising figure — moved him to his own private school. The syllabus was classical practice books played with a pick: scales and arpeggios, six volumes in five years, then scores, and at the end nothing but Bach. Imai finished in June 1985, the only graduate in that school's history, a distinction Takayanagi's better-known student Otomo Yoshihide does not share. Meanwhile, guesting with Takayanagi's New Direction and Takehisa Kosugi's Taj Mahal Travellers, he declined to touch a guitar at all, singing or playing a replica viola da gamba instead. He stopped performing in 1985, returned in December 1991, and in 1997 convened Marginal Consort, whose four-hour improvisations still happen once a year.