Monday Night Special: Wild Rose Moon Radio Hour

Following in the footsteps of jazz fusion guitar players such as Ralph Towner, Alex DeGrassi, and Pierre Bensusan, Kyoto-born, Hiroya Tsukamoto graces the Wild Rose Moon stage with his own brand of looper-driven composition on this 60th edition of the Wild Rose Moon Radio Hour. Hiroya uses a mix of repeated bass notes, sung passages, whispers, and other repeated melodic structures to anchor his pieces and then supplies melodic structures and harmonics on top of the piece to complete it. His first piece, “From Coast to Coast,” begins with charming bell sounds that roll into beautiful note structures that weave the piece together until his voice enters to follow the melody in a kind of beautiful prayer. Introducing his next piece, Hiroya remarked, “Sometimes I compose music when I visit different places or meet different people. Then the music just comes easier – I don’t know why — it just does. I wrote this piece about a mountain in Utah some years ago.” What follows is one of Hiroya’s signature songs, “Gemini Bridge.” Layering up a hook of a bass line, Hiroya begins to add melodic structure creating the first theme, part way into the piece the layers are gone until a new one emerges complete with a rhythmic shaker and voices intoning lyrics in a prayer-like fashion. Like much jazz-fusion and new-age composition, the music provides a backdrop for the mind to float upon a sea of wave-like patterns that increase the chance of the one entering an alpha state, which allows the listener to disappear inside the composition itself. This sense of the song as transparent is intrinsic to his music and Hiroya’s songs are an open invitation to experience music as a kind of universal river of which we are all apart. Hiroya’s third song is decidedly unlayered and functions almost as a reassuring lullaby. It moves out of the songwriting period forced upon his family by the pandemic period. The song may reflect this "quiet" period during which he helped his seven-year-old daughter with her schoolwork. The last piece on the program, “Hobbomock,” is a more narrative tribute to the Mountain known as the “Sleeping Giant,” outside of Mount Carmel, Connecticut. Composed while in residence at Quinnipiac University, the piece is episodic and is inspired by the folk tale of the mountain as formulated by the Native American people who named it, “Hobbomock”. As a special treat, the radio show also features a twist of a nursery rhyme, “Jill and Jack,” performed by playwright and actor, Jan Probst, along with, radio host, George Schricker. Jan is an actor and noted playwright, hailing originally from Plymouth, Indiana where the Wild Rose Moon Radio Hour is recorded.