The Japanese avant garde trumpeter Itaru Oki passed away on 25 August. He was one the key players in the development of a distinctively Japanese take on free jazz in the Tokyo scene of the late 1960s and early 70s, leading his own power trio and collaborating with other formative names like percussionist Masahiko Togashi and bassist Keiki Midorikawa. In 1974, Oki moved to France, where he remained until his death, an actively engaged and generous collaborator with European and US players including Alan Silva, Noah Howard, François Tusques, Linda Sharrock and Axel Dörner.

The desire to push further out, further away from his starting point was a constant motivating force for Oki throughout his life. You can feel it in the roadmap of his life journey and hear it in his questing trumpet lines. You can see it too in visual form on the classic photo on the cover of his 1976 album Mirage. Boots and fur coat on, knitted cap pulled down over his forehead, trumpet slung over his shoulder and cigarette in hand, Oki leans pensively against a monumental metal lantern at a Japanese temple. A brief pause for reflection before he lights out for the territories.

Like many other founders of Japanese free jazz (Masahiko Togashi, Sabu Toyozumi, Masahiko Satoh, Mototeru Takagi), Oki was a war baby. He was born in 1941 in Kobe, and by a very happy accident he lived across the street from the elder brother of Japan’s first jazz trumpeter of note, Fumio Nanri, who had cut his chops in Shanghai and San Francisco in the 1930s. Apparently Nanri gave Oki his first trumpet lessons, showing him how to hold the instrument and form his first embouchure. Oki moved to Tokyo in 1965 and progressed rapidly through Dixieland and bebop before finding a home amongst the new jazz experimentalists of the period. He was a member of one of the first Japanese free jazz units, ESSG, with Satoh and Togashi, and first toured Europe in 1969.

Soon afterwards, he started his own trio with drummer Hozumi Tanaka and bassist and cellist Keiki Midorikawa. He released a series of LPs with the trio and later under his own name that were both formally inventive (one piece on his first album features a trumpet solo played into a bowl of water) and ambitiously restless. Oki was much taken by Togashi’s distinctive ‘speed and space’ approach to the rhythmic development of free jazz, and he deployed a similar oceanic pulse on early albums like Satsujin Kyoshitsu (Classroom For Murderers) and Genso Note (Phantom Note).

Once settled in Europe, Oki’s entrée to the local jazz scene came through Alan Silva. Oki was one of the early teachers of the revolutionary musical pedagogy taught at Silva’s Institut Art Culture Perception (IACP), founded in Paris in 1976. He was a frequent and inspired player on Silva and IACP-related projects like The Texture Sextet and The Celestial Communication Orchestra. He performed on a wide array of horns and woodwind instruments, but he was also known as an accomplished trumpet builder, making instruments with the bell at bizarre angles or even with two bells.

In spite of his long residence in France and his embeddedness in the European free improv scene, Oki maintained a close relationship with Japan. Every year he would return home in the autumn to tour extensively and record in a series of ad hoc units with some of the ageing giants of the scene as well as with a host of younger players.

In an interview with the jazz critic Teruto Soejima for the sleevenotes for his first LP, Satsujin Kyoshitsu (1970), Oki commented prophetically: “I want to keep on moving forward, so that decades from now, even if I’ve gone bald, I still want to be playing new jazz.”