Toshinori Kondo

A sonically bold Japanese trumpeter, Toshinori Kondo was a creative maverick whose conceptual music straddled avant-garde jazz, electro-industrial rock, and ambient improvisation. Kondo first emerged as a key exponent of the experimental downtown New York scene of the late 1970s, playing with artists like Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, William Parker, Fred Frith, and Bill Laswell. He gained notoriety in the '80s leading his IMA group and releasing ambitious albums like 1984's Taihen, 1986's Konton, and 1989's Kamikaze Blow, which found him blending metallic funk, jazz, DJ turnt...