The Last Samurai

The boy was 16, the age Yamamoto had been when he first played Carnegie Hall. He said All right, we’ll see what we can do.

The boy took off the top and got inside, and Yamamoto fastened the covering back on. Then he bicycled to another village and he said he needed transportation back to N’Djamena. He managed eventually to get a small truck that could take the drum, and they drove back to the village. The drum stood by the shore. The boy was inside it. The owner of the truck put the drum on the truck and they drove off.

Fifty miles down the road the truck was stopped by troops. They made the driver take the drum off the truck and they said what’s in that. Nothing said Yamamoto it’s just a drum I’m taking back to Japan. All right then play it said one soldier and Yamamoto tapped it lightly with a stick.

A soldier took off the cover but they had fitted another cover just inside so that it looked as though the drum was solid inside.

Yamamoto said: You see there’s nothing there.

A soldier held up his machine gun, aimed at the drum, and fired a round. There was a scream, and then a whimper, and then all the soldiers fired at the drum while splinters flew up and blood seeped out onto the dirt and when they got tired of shooting they stopped and there was silence.

The soldier said: You’re right there’s nothing there.

Yamamoto thought his turn would be next. A soldier swung up his gun by the barrel and hit him once on the head with the handle. He fell to the ground. He said later that he wasn’t afraid at first because he assumed he was going to die. Then he realised that his hands were lying in the dirt next to the boots of a soldier. He thought they would destroy his hands and he could not move for terror. Then three of them kicked him in the ribs, and he passed out.

When he came to the soldiers and the truck were gone. All that was left was the drum riddled with bullets, the ground beside it wet with blood. His papers and money were gone. His hands were all right.

He checked to see that the boy was dead and he was dead. He had nothing to bury him with, so he started walking. He walked for two days without food or water. Twice trucks passed him and refused to stop. At last one stopped and much much later he got back to Paris.

People were prepared to be sympathetic but he alienated everyone by saying Well obviously my trip didn’t work out the way I’d hoped but the one bright spot is that I got back in time to take part in a production of Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples.

Or people would say was it hard to put it behind you and Yamamoto would say Well when I got back Claude said I was stupid to go he said why are you so obsessed with drums drums are beside the point listen to Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités—

—so the first thing I did when I got back was listen to the Messiaen which is about, well basically it’s about the dying sound. That’s what a piano produces, a dying sound. You know, the hammer strikes the string and then it bounces away again and you just have the string vibrating until it stops, and you can just let that happen or you can prolong it with a pedal or and this is where it gets interesting you have the fact that other strings will vibrate in sympathy with certain frequencies & you can just let that happen or you can come in with a pedal at one place or another as it dies—

Or people would say Do you think you’ll ever go back to Africa

and he would say Well I’d like to go back someday because my last visit wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped from a musical point of view.

ST: How did this lead up to what people have called the Wigmore Hall debacle?

Yamamoto: Well my agent had made the booking a long time before. What I thought at this time was that music was not about sound but about perception of sound which means in a sense that to perceive what it is you need also some sense of what it could be but is not which includes other types of sounds and also silence.

ST: The Wigmore Hall?

Yamamoto: To put it another way, let’s just take a little phrase on the piano, it sounds one way if you’ve just heard a big drum and another way if you’ve heard a gourd and another way if you’ve heard the phrase on another instrument and another way again if you’ve just heard nothing at all—there are all kinds of ways you can hear the same sound. And then, if you’re practising, you hear a phrase differently depending on how you’ve just played it, you might play it twenty or thirty different ways and what it actually is at any time depends on all those things it might be—

ST: It sounds a little like Gould’s decision to leave the concert stage because he could get a better piece of music in the recording studio.