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Learning from Frank Zappa: “You Must Not Lie in Your Music”
-I think there is a general image that kids who have been playing classical piano since they were little “stick to that path,” but that was not the case with your classmates at school, nor with Umei herself.
Umei: I am a very greedy person. I have always wanted to be able to do this and that, and of course I love the piano, but that’s not enough for me. He was also an arranger, so he knew a lot about all genres of music. I was very envious of that. It was through that teacher that I started listening to Niacin and Frank Zappa.
-What did he teach you as a musician?
Umei: He let me play freely. At first, he was concerned about my interest in classical piano and popular music at the same time, but he also said that while I was playing the electone, the children who had been playing only piano were growing rapidly, and he said, “If you want to enter competitions in piano, you should focus on piano. I think it’s right to say, “If you want to enter piano competitions, you should focus on piano. However, I think it was very important that Niacin understood my personality of wanting to do whatever I wanted to do and allowed me to do whatever I wanted.
-And he taught me everything from Niacin to Frank Zappa [laughs].
Umei： In the Frank Zappa documentary film “ZAPPA” (2022), he says, “My purpose in life is to take my works home and listen to them alone. I do it for that time.” I really empathized with that. I haven’t recorded that many of my own works yet, but I am really happy to take them home and listen to them alone. I could feel from the documentary that Frank Zappa never lied about his music, and it really filled my heart with joy.
-That’s a great story. Did you also want to create and express your music without lying?
Umei: Nowadays, you can get all kinds of information through SNS. Living in such a world, I sometimes don’t know what I want to do. But when I saw Zappa’s way of life, I thought to myself, “I must never lie about my music, and I must never forget that.
