Kitaro

Kitaro stands among the leading figures in new age music, with a discography that has moved millions of copies worldwide and supported repeated international tours, all while collecting both Grammy and Golden Globe recognition. His sound merges reflective, tuneful synthesizer lines with acoustic instruments and draws equally on Eastern traditions and the vocabularies of folk, classical, and rock. The Japanese composer first learned electric guitar as a high-school student after discovering Otis Redding’s rhythm-and-blues recordings.

During the early 1970s he assembled the Far East Family Band and issued two progressive-rock albums before a 1972 European visit brought him into contact with synthesist Klaus Schulze. The meeting prompted Kitaro to construct his own synthesizer and begin investigating unconventional timbres.

Astral Voyage, his initial solo album, surfaced in 1978 and quickly attracted a devoted audience. Two years later he supplied the first of several scores for Silk Road, the Japanese documentary series that continued for five seasons; soundtrack albums drawn from the project reached an expanding global listenership that responded to the music’s opulent, sweeping surfaces and its unadorned, almost childlike melodies. Domestic awareness remained modest until Geffen Records signed him in 1986, reissuing seven earlier titles and underwriting larger projects. After years of solitary work in his Mt. Fuji studio, he recorded the 1987 album The Light of the Spirit alongside Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. The sessions enlisted numerous American players and earned Kitaro his first Grammy nomination in the New Age field. The same year he undertook his debut North American tour and achieved two million U.S. sales.

Thereafter his writing grew more dramatic and emphatic while preserving an essential gentleness. Later releases revisited the rock and pop impulses that had first engaged him in the late 1960s. Beyond his work with Hart he joined Yes vocalist Jon Anderson on the 1992 album Dream and co-produced Scenes, the solo outing by former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman, also issued in 1992. The 1997 soundtrack for the Broadway-bound production Cirque Ingenieux was followed by Thinking of You in 1999 and Ancient in spring 2001. Strong response to Ancient led to the companion volume Ancient Journey in 2002, the same year that brought his contributions to the soundtrack of the Chinese drama The Soong Sisters together with a live album and DVD.

Beginning in 2003 Kitaro issued the ongoing peace-themed cycle Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai. In 2007 he composed the score for Impression West Lake, the opera staged by Zhang Yimou; the music appeared as Impressions of the West Lake in 2009. A 2012 partnership with Native American activist Dennis Banks produced Let Mother Earth Speak. The solo album Final Call followed in 2013, and the concert recording Symphony Live in Istanbul appeared the next year. Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai, Vol. 5 arrived in 2017, succeeded by the Kojiki and the Universe tour and its accompanying DVD centered on the 1990 album Kojiki.