Notes by PEK

I’ve been thinking a bit about early times in my music career recently, so I dug through my hard drives and found the one that has the digitized files of my early work from 84 to 92. Most of it is not well recorded, but there are some studio sessions and some things better recorded by Space on a 4-channel Reel to Reel recorder.

After moving from California to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music in 1989, my most important mentor in free improvisation was Masashi Harada. Masashi is a gifted improvisor who used piano, percussion, voice, dance, and visual imagery in his art making. For a few years we played music constantly in different settings and Masashi recorded everything. Some of the sets were at his loft apartment with a whole bunch of different players from the scene, but we also had several bands. Masashi was the leader of this scene, but I was his helper and a constant participant.

Masashi performed in Berlin in a trio with Cecil Taylor and William Parker a year or two before I arrived in Boston in 1989, so he knew them both. He arranged for William to travel up from New York to perform with the Masashi Harada Sextet. We booked the Middle East Café for this show about 6 months before they added the “new” room in the basement where the bowling alley was. The Middle East was a more prominent venue which we used William’s name to get in to – a better space than the Willow, which was our usual room. Since they had no piano, Masashi played percussion for this show.

At the time of this writing, I’ve spoken with Masashi about posting this material up on my Deep Archive, but it would be inappropriate to post that show to my site without checking in with William. That may happen later; however, for now, we did get an excellent recording of a Quartet Edition of the MHQ promoting the Middle East Café performance on the Jazz Oasis radio show on WERS at Emerson College in downtown Boston. I think we played this program a few times during this period, but I only seem to have this one recording in my record.

I posted the whole radio program including the interviewing – where somehow the interviewee ended up being yours truly – despite my being the junior member. I think I was closest to the host, and Masashi was on the far side of the room at his instrument. Anyway, the Jazz Oasis was mostly a Program featuring much more square jazz, not really free-jazz, so it’s interesting to hear the questions from the host as he sought to understand our music a bit.  We played three of Masashi’s compositions from the book: Polymorphism, Penumbra, and Intervalia.

PEK – 11/1/2026

Constructed Photo Work by Masashi Harada