Ok, so it's not really a project, and I've missed this week's band to watch (look out for a great one next week), but I wanted to draw your attention to perhaps the most fascinating individual I have ever had the chance of hearing speak.
Over the years I've seen a number of memorable speakers, everyone from noted sex advice columnists, prime ministers, economists, and diplomats. However last week I was privy to a speech and q & a session by a true genius and a very humble and benevolent man, Mr. Kakehashi, founder and special consultant to the Roland Corporation of Japan. Mr. K., as he is fondly called by members of staff, is getting on in years but he recently made a visit to Roland UK's head office in Swansea to see how things were going.
This man is a god in the musical world. He invented so many of the world's first digital instruments, everything from drum machines, to the chorus effect, to digital pianos and synthesizers, most of which he designed himself. As a patient struck down with TB in his younger days, he was hospitalized for 3 years, during which time he hand built a television so that he and the other patients could watch Japan's first television broadcast. Incredible.
But more incredible is the fact that he has absolutely no regard for profit, or capitalistic greed that usually taints the CEOs of large multinational corporations. Mr. K. believes in cooperation, it was in cooperation with the founder of Sequential Circuits, that Mr. K. invented MIDI, one of the greatest musical inventions of the last twenty years. When asked what his greatest accomplishment had been. Mr. K. coolly responded with two fingers, and said "two years, give me two years and I'll show it to you". Here's a man not content to sit on his laurels though he is 80+ years of age and in poor health. Here is a man constantly looking to the future whose only words of advice for all the staff was to "keep and open mind and be friendly".
Words to live by.
