Mirror Pond (Kyōko-Chi) (2010)

Genre: Contemporary Jazz, World

In the Spring of 2005, I had the privilege of traveling to Japan with a group of fellow educators. Our trip was sponsored by Teaching East Asia (TEA), a program located at the University of Colorado and generously funded by the Freeman Foundation. TEA sponsored workshops and provided teachers with resources to help facilitate the teaching of Asia in their classrooms.

During one of our days in Kyoto, we were assigned to groups and sent off to visit a series of Japanese temples and gardens to record our impressions. Those experiences became the focal point of our evening Socratic seminar.

It’s hard to explain the exquisite beauty a Japanese garden, where every sight line seems purposely designed to reveal a new perspective. It was a rainy day, the color saturation rich, the gardens verdant, and each new step framed a changed picture before our eyes. Every site we visited was extraordinary, but my most vivid impression was of Rokuon-Ji Temple, where a Golden Pavilion was reflected in the water, what the tourist brochure referred to as a “Mirror Pond.”

Five years later, in 2010, another organization located in Colorado (The Gift of Jazz) sponsored a series of jazz composition and arranging classes taught by Chie Imaizumi, a native of Japan and a rising young talent in the jazz world. I jumped at the chance to learn from this gifted composer/arranger. [Check out Chie’s albums “Unfailing Kindness” (2006) and “A Time of New Beginnings” (2010) on Capri Records.]

Chie, believing that every composition should come from the heart, encouraged us to begin the creative process by listing 20 words that would describe the mood, feel, color or person associated with the piece we hoped to write. As I thought about the mood I wanted to create, I was drawn to memories of Kyoto. Returning to my notebook from 2005, I found a page with approximately 20 words (!) I had listed that afternoon describing the place I had come to think of as “Mirror Pond.”

Over the course of eight weeks, Chie taught us how to develop our songs, notate them, arrange them for a five-piece combo, and transpose the parts for different instruments. On May 1st, 2010 at Dazzle in Denver, we premiered our creations. For over two hours, the musicians Chie had chosen to perform our pieces (Kurt Eherenman, Mike Schreiber, Cliff Siegel, Matt Powelson and Dave Barton), sight-read the music we provided them and one by one brought our compositions to life, an experience that was exhilarating for all of us. (Check out the video of this live performance on my YouTube channel.)

The underlying mood of “Mirror Pond” is “contemplative.” I wanted my piece to be filled with the sense of wonder one experiences when seeing something new and beautiful for the first time. At the same time I wanted to imply a tinge of melancholy that comes from being a long way from home, immersed in a different culture.

Thanks to TEA and The Gift of Jazz for helping me realize this vision.

For this 2023 remake, I decided to add in a soundscape of rain to evoke that unforgettable day in 2005. I also blended in some instruments of traditional Asian musical heritage I hoped would better approximate the sound I first envisioned for the piece.