Japan’s sax polymath Yasuaki Shimizu might be a postmodern Bach

Halfway through Bye Bye Kipling, Nam June Paik’s mash-up of music and video graphics from 1986, the camera pans to a tenor saxophone player as he leaps through Tribute To N.J.P. with its composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, behind him on piano, conjuring a blend of Dmitri Shostakovich and Keith Jarrett.

- WALKER MIMMS

The two musicians had joined Paik’s project, which was simultaneously broadcast from New York and Tokyo, to help rebut Rudyard Kipling’s line: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

The twain met again last week, when that saxophonist, Yasuaki Shimizu, embarked on his first North American tour, starting at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday and Friday, before going on to Chicago, Toronto, California and Seattle. And on Saturday, at the Metrograph theatre on the Lower East Side, Shimizu introduced four films that he scored, including Bye Bye Kipling.

For a musician whose inventive arrangements of Johann Sebastian Bach and whose TV and movie scores have made him a minor celebrity in Japan, the tour is long overdue. (He last performed in the United States in the 1970s.)

A career retrospective, it should give audiences a taste of Shimizu’s wide-ranging music. He has recorded some 40 albums in as many years — starting in the late 1970s with slick fusion boogie and progressive rock — and has been a prized sideman in the electronic and improvised scenes. With most of his recordings still out of print in the States, he has remained something of a cult figure there.