My VISTEC farewell band

Throughout my five years at VISTEC, I officially started following Jeff Berlin, the legendary bassist, and his lessons transformed my musical abilities forever. Inspired by this, I wanted to form an instrumental band to showcase the musical ideas I had been practicing for the past five years—before my time at VISTEC came to an end. This became my final mission, a way to express gratitude for the fate that brought me here to develop both my research and musical skills before moving on to the next stage of my music research career at the international level.

I never expected to form a trio with just bass, piano, and saxophone, but the only musicians willing to join and dedicate 12 hours per week to practice with me for two and a half months were a pianist and a saxophonist.

Our first challenge was to avoid the predictability of traditional roles—where the saxophone plays the melody and the bass sticks to root notes. To keep things interesting, I rearranged three pop songs, ensuring that we rotated between playing the main melodic line and providing support (see an example above). One of the songs we reinterpreted was the Detective Conan theme song (see a clip below). Our version incorporated excerpts from 26 different arrangements of the theme as heard in Conan movies 1–26. If you listen closely, about 50% of it sounds unmistakably like Conan, while the other 50% might not—yet 40% of that “unrecognizable” part still originates from Conan.

I am deeply grateful to my bandmates for believing in me. They are not intermediate players—one of them hadn’t played an instrument in ten years. Yet, together, we pulled it off. I am incredibly proud of this band, and I never thought I had this level of musical ability in me (and I still keep practicing !!!) This was the perfect farewell to my time at VISTEC.