A Renowned Japanese-New Zealand Composer Charts His Journey to 50: ‘I’ve Always Had This Feeling That I Have to Leave and See What’s Next’

“The blueprint for how I’ve lived my life was my parents,” reflected the Japanese-New Zealand pianist, composer, beatmaker, producer and DJ Mark de Clive-Lowe. “In the 1950s, my dad travelled from New Zealand to Japan, where he met my mum and stayed for 20 years. They had this trans-hemisphere relationship that became our family mode. It’s only become cognisant to me over the last five years, but I was always looking for where I belonged. It’s been a constant search through different places, communities and connections trying to find home basically.”

Over the last three decades, de Clive-Lowe’s search for belonging has taken him from Auckland to London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo while regularly circumnavigating the globe for live performances, DJ sets, and recording sessions with a who’s who of modern music. Although he’s perhaps best known historically for his breakout albums, Six Degrees and Tides Rising, released worldwide in 2000 and 2005, if you look through the liner notes of late 20th/early 21st century musical history, you’ll find him everywhere. 

During the 1990s, de Clive-Lowe found a sweet spot in Auckland’s inner-city nightclub scene with a generation of musicians, DJs, and rappers who were figuring it out together live on stage.

As the 2000s dawned, he made his way to the UK for the birth of the fêted West London Broken Beat movement. By the time that decade was over, de Clive-Lowe had become a key player in the musical dialogue between the West Coast and East Coast underground beats, jazz, soul, and hip-hop scenes in the US. Lately, he’s been living in Japan, where he’s been deeply immersed in his most profound journey yet. “I’ve always had this feeling that I have to leave and see what’s next,” he mused.

On August 16th, 2024, de Clive-Lowe turned 50. In late July, he spent two hours on Zoom with Rolling Stone AU/NZ, reflecting on a lifetime in music. Several days later, de Clive-Lowe performed at The Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles as part of ‘Dilla’s House’, celebrating the late great Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla’s influence on house music. Despite everything he has accomplished, his best days are still ahead.

Growing up between Auckland and Tokyo, where he spent annual holidays with his mother’s family from age 10, de Clive-Lowe took to playing piano and listening to jazz from a young age. During his early high school years in the late 1980s, he discovered the Afrocentric New York hip-hop collective Native Tongues and became obsessed with their sampledelic sounds. Equally, when the American record producers Teddy Riley, Bernard Belle, and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis combined hip-hop production techniques with jazz and funk-dusted R&B to create New Jack Swing, he was all in. 

“By 1990, I owned a synthesiser, a sequencer, and a drum machine,” de Clive-Lowe remembered. “I used all that gear to assemble a one-person band and entered a talent quest at Selwyn College. I was a fish out of water, different from everyone else.” Afterwards, the R&B/New Jack Swing group Semi MCs asked if he wanted to jam. They introduced him to Voodoo Rhyme Syndicate, a teenage collective of mostly Polynesian hip-hop groups, singers, and DJs from South and West Auckland. 

From there, de Clive-Lowe recorded rough demos with the Urban Pasifika groups Select1 and Sisters Underground, the latter best known for their top 40 hit “In the Neighbourhood.” The well-known rapper, vocalist and producer Sani Sagala, aka Dei Hamo, who worked with him in Select1, remembered de Clive-Lowe introducing him to jazz. “Mark helped open up my mind to a whole new world,” he said. “Those years allowed me to make friends I would have never met without music.”

“They all welcomed me based on their interest in what I was doing, my interest in what they were doing, and where we could meet in the middle,” de Clive-Lowe reflected. “With hindsight, I realise that was a touchstone moment which has played out for me over and over again throughout my life.”

In 1995, de Clive-Lowe spent two semesters studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. “At the time, I just wanted to be a straight-ahead acoustic jazz pianist playing with Art Blakey and Betty Carter,” he recalled. “Going to Berklee was a way to get to the States then. Having been in such an intense environment, all I wanted to do was get a band together and get some gigs. If there wasn’t a door open for me, I’d make my own door.” In a testament to this, as the Auckland writer Graham Reid observed in a profile for AudioCulture, “Mark de Clive-Lowe always seemed like a young man in a hurry.”

After returning to Auckland, he formed TAP Records with his friend Andrew Dubber and released two solo jazz albums, First Thoughts (1996) and Vision (1997). TAP Records was their Music Industry 101 class. “We ran it into the ground, but we still learned how independent music can and can’t work,” he laughed. “That experience was pretty much my template for everything to come.

“I wouldn’t have done a label without Andrew’s help,” he continued. “There’s been a few characters around over the years who have given me that extra push to try something new.” 

Credit: Supplied

Near the end of 1997, de Clive-Lowe experienced a moment of transformation. Once a month, he’d participate in an improvised jam session with DJs, rappers, and other musicians at a storied nightclub on High Street, Cause Celebre. Compared to the suited-and-booted trad jazz gigs he played around town, it was a fun, free and informal affair. “I loved how we’d be playing this jazzy, beatsy, hip-hop soul music at Cause Celebre, and then in the room next door [The Box], they’d be DJing acid house,” he said. “That combination was really beautiful to me, and I enjoyed the social culture of it.” One night, while playing the piano at the Auckland Town Hall, he couldn’t get the Cause Celebre jams out of his mind. “I thought, what if I could be a little bit more serious about the thing I have fun with? It was a penny-drop moment.”

Looking back 27 years later, de Clive-Lowe realised he had spent much of his musical life exploring the spectrum between jazz and electronic beat music. “At this point, I also relate that to my Japanese and New Zealand halves,” he said. “The space in between is everything. I’ve learned that is where you find yourself.”

In 1998, de Clive-Lowe received a NZ Young Achievers Award, which allowed him to spend the year exploring music in Sydney, Tokyo, Havana, London, Paris, New York City, and San Francisco. In West London, he was floored over by the sound of Broken Beat: an intoxicating fusion of jazz-funk, boogie, electro, African and Latin music, hip-hop, jungle, techno, and house. “Seeing DJ producers like Phil Asher, IG Culture, and Bugz in the Attic use MPCs and SP1200s (sampling drum machines) to chop up loops, reprogram them, and create these rhythm tracks that were so musically advanced and innovative was inspiring.” During that portion of his trip, he participated in plenty of studio sessions.

On the way back to New Zealand, de Clive-Lowe stopped in Tokyo and purchased an Akai MPC from the storied Harajuku synthesiser store, 5G. Once he’d returned home, he sat down with the MPC, a Rhodes piano, and a synthesiser and sketched out the music that became his third solo album, Six Degrees. “Ostensibly, it was a diary or a journal of the year I’d spent travelling the world,” he said. 

Six Degrees saw de Clive-Lowe take on the emerging Broken Beat sound and combine it with the energy of his friends from the Cause Celebre scene: DJ Manuel Bundy, King Kapisi, Teremoana Rapley, Cherie Mathieson, and his old schoolmate, the respected New Zealand producer Andy Morton, aka Submariner. After being released locally by the Auckland electronica label Kog Transmissions, the album came to the attention of a fellow New Zealander, Nathan Graves, then the Head of Jazz at Universal Music UK.

“He was like, ‘I want to sign you,’ so I ended up signing with Universal in the UK,” de Clive-Lowe remembered. “That was my sign I should move to London, and it became the calling card that introduced me to the world.” 

In West London, de Clive-Lowe collaborated at a breakneck rate. During the early 2000s, his name appeared as an instrumentalist, writer, producer, or remixer on a staggering number of releases from members of the extended Broken Beat community. He recalled the late producer and DJ Phil Asher as his gateway into that world. “Phil really took me under his wing, watched out for me and introduced me to everyone,” he said. “We were working all the time. I remember waking up in the morning and knowing that at the end of that day, there would be some really sick music that didn’t exist yet, and we would have created it. That would happen every day. It was a really beautiful period.” 

In 2005, de Clive-Lowe released his celebrated fourth album, Tide’s Rising, through ABB Soul, a division of the Californian label ABB Records. “It was a huge label to be on,” he enthused. “They had Little Brother, Sa-Ra, Dilated Peoples. It was a really great foundation.” At the time, de Clive-Lowe was collaborating with acclaimed American artists like DJ Spinna and Kenny Dope from Masters At Work and had been touring across the Atlantic. “It felt like there was a natural progression happening.” 

In 2008, a change in de Clive-Lowe’s life circumstances led to him relocating to Los Angeles. Although he’d always wanted to move to New York, it didn’t take long for him to realise that the West Coast was the right place to be. “London can be a little grim weather-wise, and suddenly I was backed by the Pacific Ocean,” he said. Six months later, he attended an invitation-only jam in downtown LA, where he met the string arranger and viola player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the trumpeter Todd Simon, and the vocalist Nia Andrews. 

Andrews helped de Clive-Lowe reconnect with the piano, which he had neglected over the previous ten years. They began a decade-long relationship as musical collaborators and partners. In LA, he created the storied club night CHURCH. Named after a suggestion from Andrews, CHURCH’s “equal parts jazz club, dance party, and live remix experiment” ethos served as a way for him to illustrate the connections between his musical loves.

Throughout the 2010s, Hiatus Kaiyote frontwoman Nai Palm, James Genus, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Nia Andrews, Eric Harland, Terrace Martin, Moses Sumney, Kamasi Washington, and countless others graced the stage at CHURCH. Soon enough, de Clive-Lowe had the opportunity to bring the party to New York and London.

“LA allowed me to really embrace everything I’d ever loved about jazz,” he reflected. “I was in the US, the home of the music. Suddenly, I felt free to do whatever I wanted. It wasn’t long until I was playing with people I’d really looked up to, like the amazing spiritual jazz vocalist Dwight Tribble and the drummer Harvey Mason.” 

In LA, de Clive-Lowe continued to collaborate and release music with restless abandon. Between 2006 and 2017, he released, by my count, 10 well-regarded studio albums, live recordings, and remix collections through his own Antipodean Records and Mashibeats labels, as well as Columbia, Tru Thoughts, Embrace Recordings and Ropeadope Records. He probably released double as many singles and EPs in that time, keeping one foot in the home listening market and another in global DJ culture. Again, there’s that sliding spectrum he talked about earlier. 

Credit: Makoto Ebi

While living in London and LA, de Clive-Lowe occasionally returned to New Zealand to visit family members and play shows. Over the years, he’s continued encouraging successive generations of New Zealand talent, including the now London-based drummer and composer Myele Manzanza and, recently, the Wellington composer and saxophonist Louisa Williamson. “The bottom line is that at the end of the day, these people are phenomenally talented,” he enthused. “I’m a huge believer in the value of history, lineage, and passing the torch to the next generation. I think we’re at a point where for digital natives, lineage and the order in which things happened isn’t as relevant because we can consume it all now, but it still matters to me.” 

In 2015, de Clive-Lowe had his “non-religious come to god moment.” Chuckling gently, he explained it was a realisation that Japan was his spiritual home and New Zealand was his biological home. “I wanted to pursue that,” he said. He got the opportunity when he was commissioned to explore the ancient folklore, traditional music, and culture underpinning his Japanese roots, write a body of work informed by them, and present it at LA’s Grand Performances concert series. The resulting show, Mirai no Rekishi – History of the Future, became the basis of his 2019 albums, Heritage and Heritage II. “It was the most satisfying experience I’d had performing in a long time,” he admitted. “It felt more me than anything I’d ever done.”

Even though Mirai no Rekishi – History of the Future was specific to de Clive-Lowe’s ancestry, after every show, audience members approached him to discuss their curiosity about their own roots. “There was something very universal clicking with this,” he said. “It became very apparent that I wanted to keep exploring this.” Those experiences led to him having broader discussions in the performing arts space. Before long, he was conversing with The National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, that suggested he apply for the US-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship; in 2020, they awarded him it.

Three years later, that fellowship funded de Clive-Lowe to spend five months in Japan, retracing his father’s journey over the two decades he spent living there. “That was one of the most profound experiences I’ve had in my life,” he reflected. “The level of catharsis and posthumous healing I experienced was incredible. I was about to return to the States and take a role as a professor at a music college, but I realised I wanted to stay in Japan and keep pursuing this feeling.” 

Having been awarded a Creative Fellowship Fund by the Creative New Zealand arts funding agency and commissioned to perform at the biennial Japan Festival in Wellington with the Good Company Arts group in September, de Clive-Lowe is in good spirits.

In August, he’ll celebrate his 50th birthday milestone with shows across Japan before releasing new music later in the year. Decades into his career, he’s still thinking about new ways to be creative. “Here’s the metaphor: for me, the performance of music is a performance of process rather than a performance of product,” he explained as we concluded our conversation. “If people see that performance of process, it might spark a thought about something they could do differently in their lives. That’s the goal for me.”

Find de Clive-Lowe’s tour dates here.