A true artist without borders: there is no other way to define Ryuichi Sakamoto, a musician and composer capable of moving with great ease from electronics to bossa nova, from classical music to dance, to film music. And each time a personal stylistic signature can be found that combines the desire to experiment and communicate. This has been true since the days of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the techno-pop group formed together with bassist Haruomi Hosono and drummer Yokihiro Takahashi that in the late Seventies gave Sakamoto his first notoriety, even outside the borders of his country of origin; Thousand Knives of Asia, the first solo album by the musician from Nakano, also dates back to that period. In 1983, the year of the end of his important experience with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto composed the music for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a film in which he also co-starred with David Bowie: among the songs conceived for the soundtrack of Nagisa Oshima’s film, “Forbidden Colours” stands out, embellished by the voice of David Sylvian of Japan. Subsequently, his collaborations with very different artists became more frequent: from Iggy Pop to Youssou N’Dour, from Brian Wilson to Robbie Robertson, from Arto Lindsay to Robert Wyatt and Caetano Veloso, from the poet William Burroughs to electronic experimenters such as the German Alva Noto and the Austrian Fennesz, up to the Brazilian cellist Jacques Morelenbaum, with whom Sakamoto paid heartfelt homage to Antonio Carlos Jobim, one of the fathers of bossa nova. The ties between Sakamoto and cinema are strengthened, instead, with Wild Palms by Oliver Stone, with High Heels by Pedro Almodovar, but above all with the three films directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha. The music of The Last Emperor (also composed by David Byrne and the Chinese Cong Su) won the Oscar: the parts that bear the seal of Sakamoto represent an effective meeting point between elements of the oriental, symphonic tradition and the most typical film music. The symphonic component therefore finds its natural evolution in the soundtrack of The Sheltering Sky: the main theme of the film is a concentration of melodic taste and expressive tension and is among the best things conceived by Sakamoto, not only for the cinema.
