& I said But is it a desert and is there a lake
& he said Yes but it can’t possibly be there
& then he said Forget about Africa, you don’t know what you want, I’m getting together some people to put on Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples stick around & you can have the piano
ST: So you went to Chad.
Yamamoto: That’s right.
Yamamoto said that when he finally found the place there was something almost magical about it—the lake was there, and the hill, and the hut a little way apart, and the people who would play a piece of music with six or seven rhythms all at once. The things they played while he was there melted away over the lake, and he never got to hear the other drums.
Yamamoto: I’d managed to set aside two months, which was practically unheard of; got to Chad; incredible hassle getting out to the village, isn’t there some movie about a guy who tries to take Caruso up the Amazon?
ST: Yes?
Yamamoto: With Klaus Kinski?
ST: Yes?
Yamamoto: Well, that gives you some idea, and then to top it all I get maybe two weeks, maximum, in the village with the drums and then Kaboom! It’s gone.
ST: This is the part a lot of people find hard to believe.
Yamamoto: I know, I know, how could I even think of going two months without practising? Sometimes I have trouble believing it myself.
Yamamoto had been staying in the village and one day he bicycled over to the mountains to see some rock paintings, taking a boy from the village as his guide. He had noticed a lot of soldiers around but he had never had the time to be interested in politics. When they got back to the village everyone in it was dead. The boy said they would kill him if they found him and Yamamoto had to help him get away. At first Yamamoto said there was nothing he could do but the boy said you’ve got to help me.
They were alone in a village full of dead bodies. Yamamoto said Don’t you have to beat the drum for them? Or is that only for the dying?
The boy said I am too young, and then he said No, you are right.
He went to the hut. Yamamoto followed him. Inside were seven drums, but five were almost eaten away by termites, and one was quite badly damaged, and only one still stood upright. The boy took it from the hut and set it up on the shore of the lake. It seemed to be made from the trunk of some hardwood tree, though Yamamoto had never seen anything but low twisted bushes of scrub in the area.
The boy tilted the drum back against a stand, and when it was late afternoon he began to strike the drum very lightly with a stick. When the sun was close to the horizon he struck eight louder blows, and then, when the sun dropped below the horizon, he brought the stick down on the drumhead with all his might. Then he held the stick at his side and waited for several seconds, but no sound came back over the water. Again he struck the drum, and again the sound died away over the water and did not return. Then he struck it a third time so hard the drum quivered and trembled, but no sound came back and he dropped the stick in the sand.
No, he said, it will not come back, there is nothing to come back to—
And he said that they must cut it open and he would hide inside and Yamamoto would take the drum with him when he went.
Yamamoto said this was a stupid plan, the boy would be safer just—
But he couldn’t think of some way the boy would be safer.
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—