Burning down the house...

Reuters August 2008

Musician Plays Burning Piano

Famed Japanese jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita has expressed his burning passion for music by setting his piano on fire.

At a sunset performance on a beach in Ishikawa Prefecture, western Japan, the 66-year-old Yamashita, wearing a fire fighter's suit, recently played an improvised jazz piece before about 500 spectators. No sooner had he begun playing, the piano burst into flame for a full ten minutes before all the strings were burnt out or snapped and the piano went quiet.

"I did not think I was risking my life but I was almost suffocating from the smoke that was continuously getting into my eyes and nose.

“I had decided to keep on playing until the piano stopped making sounds, so though I did not mean it, but it ended up having a life-or-death battle between the piano and myself," said Mr Yamashita.

After the performance, there were some criticisms in Japan that it was wasting a piano.

But the organizer, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art of Kanazawa, countered the argument as the burnt-down grand piano was one of hundreds of decades-old donated pianos which affluent people once bought for their children but rarely-used and dumped to a scrapper.



Thank goodness it took place on a beach, but where the heck was the ambulance! Let the viewer interpret Yamashita's performance, with artful, ringing notes, an asbestos gray sky, silver powdery sand and sparkling sea, as he or she will!

I don't know if you'll find the Mr. Yamashita's performance in Art History books. Think if he had punctuated the performance with the percussive shot of a cannon! That might have done it.

Someone commented that he should have played the Doors' "Light My Fire".