Kaoru Abe

Kaoru Abe was a Japanese saxophonist active in the 70's. He died in 77' at the age of 29 by a stomach rupture, due to his heavy usage of booze and pills and, that's my guess, to the intensity of his playing. Legend says that at his last concerts you could see blood fly out of the sax, and its kind of true that this man put as much as maybe anyone has put into his playing. During his career he played mostly solo, because of his wild behavior and playing, but he did play with some groups successfully, one of them with Masayuki Takayanagi an extreme guitarrist... together they did the 'mass projections', which consisted in everybody playing as hard and loud as they possibly could actually ignoring the rest of the band, the result is a jawdropping wall of noise, a battle to death between a guitar and a sax... i'll post it as soon as i get my hard drive fixed, but for the moment here goes a beautiful shot of him playing on the river side. He used to practice as well in busy highways, playing to the roar of the big trucks, playing above the horns and the motors. He is possibly the most free of all 'free' players.

Here goes as well a couple of quotes of him:

“Sound that stops the capacity for judgment. Sound that never decays. Sound that breaks free from every possible image. Sound that comes from both death and birth. Sound that dies. The sound around me. Sound like the symptoms of eternal cold turkey. Sound that resists private ownership. Sound that goes insane. Sound that spills over from the cosmos. The sound of sound.”

“I want to become faster than anyone. Faster than cold, than man alone, than the Earth, than Andromeda. Where, where is the crime?”