One of the most quoted lines from Naruto, the Japanese anime epic, is “Hard work is worthless for those that don’t believe in themselves.” Cleveland-born, Akron saxophonist and educator Chris Coles is such a “Naruto” fan that he wrote an album-length work, Love Deamon Song Cycle, released last Friday on Hidden Cinema Records, about it.
But when he takes the stage at BOP STOP Saturday with his Gleam ensemble, he’ll do more than just play music inspired by the Japanese anime epic, he’ll embody everything that quote represents.
The hero of the Naruto saga is Gaar of the Sand, who as a child had a demon spirit sealed in him by his father. Gaar comes into his power only after a climactic battle and the revelation of a protective spirit given to him by his mother before her death, a legacy of her love. Self-knowledge and self-love transformed him from a demon spirit’s host to the builder of a peaceful world.
Coles started watching anime before the pandemic. “I’ve always been really intrigued with cartoons and anime,” Coles said last week from his car. “But I got really into ‘Naruto.’ The story is so compelling that it just kind of hooked me.”
No wonder. The arc of Gaar’s story has a parallel in Coles’ own artistic journey, one that turned not on a battle, but rather on an encounter with an influential teacher, the late Dave Morgan.
Coles had just returned from the prestigious Banff Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music at a crossroads. “I just wrote the second movement of ‘Nine Lives’–only the second movement–and we’re sitting in a coffee shop and he says, ‘You know, one of the things you could do with this is flesh it out. Make it a multiple-movement thing [with] some animators and some dancers and some rappers,’” Coles recalls his mentor telling him. “I remember thinking, Dude, you’re out of your mind! I can’t do anything like this, but he saw the finished product and encouraged me to write the grant for it, and I wrote the grant for it and I won it.”
Coles’ multimedia tribute to the victims of the 2015 mass church shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, “Nine Lives” established its composer’s reputation for large-scale composition.
Like that work, “Love Deamon Song Cycle” is a sprawling ambitious suite calling for spoken word artists as well as instrumentalists. When Coles presents portions of the work at BOP STOP on Oct. 17, his Gleam ensemble will include Theron Brown on keyboards, drummer Zaire Darden and Patrick Graney on percussion, and spoken word artist Flocco Torres, all key players from the 2020 recording session.
They will be joined by saxophonist Steve Kortyka, Cliff Barnes on keyboards, guitarist Zakk Jones, and Heron Ko, an Oberlin Conservatory student whom Coles called, “an extremely gifted bassist.” For the performance of the entire work at a Halloween concert at BLU Jazz+ in Akron, Noa Denton will play bass, and Joe Leaman will join Brown on keyboards. The music reflects Coles’ panoptical musical vision, with elements of hip-hop, fusion, Brazilian grooves and straight-ahead jazz.
It also reveals the spark of inspiration that was fanned into flame by Dave Morgan’s encouragement, which, Coles said, “set me on this path of the magic-like thinking of storytelling as a key essential part. I feel like Naruto was a kind of a visual [way of] experiencing some of these things that Dave and I would talk about.”
Chris Coles’ Gleam Sat., Oct. 17, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, Tickets $25 available here, Sat., Oct. 31, 8 p.m., BLU Jazz+, 47 Market St., Akron, tickets $20 available here.
Love Deamon Song Cycle is available from Bandcamp at this link.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
