Albums

Songs is the current latest album from pianist/composer Hitomi Nishiyama, with her new album Layer due to be released in the next few months. Here, Songs occupies a momentous slot in Nishiyama’s recorded output, as it is a milestone album that looks back over some of her early compositions beginning with her debut album I’m Missing You from 2004. While I’ve previously introduced over a dozen of her albums here to date, I still have an almost equal amount of her other albums that I will include someday. But for now, as her new album is due out soon, I want to catch up and include her current latest album. ...

Songs in Motion is a 2018 release from guitarist Yudo Matsuo that he recorded with a quartet featuring Junichiro Ohkuchi on piano, Yoshimasa Otsuka on bass, and Sota Kira on drums. While this album follows his previous debut release Bonanza (2012), there was a full six years in between, so the guitarist/composer surely had a lot to say. As a result, Songs in Motion is an album full of his stored-up musical ideas and performances, and that spirit is bursting forth as the quartet’s energy lets loose. ...

This I Have Heard is a 2025 release from pianist Otohito Fuse, a second album as a leader quick on the heels of his Isolated from 2024. Joining him on this release are his regular trio members, Riku Takahashi on bass and Kaito Nakamura on drums. It’s a continuation and evolution of the trio sound created on their previous release, with an increased maturity and depth added to the new music. This music is patient and deep, and while there are intense tempos with free-flowing jazz improvisation and burning solos, the musicians do not hurry to get there, as if there is an abundance of confidence in building beautiful moments that will come together when the time is right. ...

Semendo Sementes is a jazz piano trio album from bassist Yuki Ito released in 2021. While bassist and composer Ito has recorded albums with different forms and combinations of musicians, and even a solo bass album, this is her first physical full-album release where she leads a piano trio. Joining her in the trio is pianist Yuka Yanigahara and drummer Hiro Kimura, regular members who were also on her previous digital mini-album release. As the leader for this group and live recording, for this set Ito plays original compositions that she wrote and arranged. To this set list, Ito includes one cover song, the old jazz standard “Time After Time” that was arranged by drummer Kimura. ...

Introducing Koichi Hirata is the 2024 debut release from jazz guitarist Koichi Hirata. Hirata is a young, up-and-coming player who has established himself as a popular musician in the live Tokyo circuit, playing live often as a support musician or a leader at his own gigs and popular jazz jam sessions. His style is unadorned with a comfortably warm sound and style that immediately brings to mind the much-admired jazz guitarists of previous generations. ...

Cheers! is the happy-go-lucky title of pianist Saki Ozawa’s debut release from 2023. It’s a fitting greeting as an introduction to this set as one that is pleasantly nimble and widely lighthearted in style. The merriment of this statement begins even from the front cover image: a fun shot of the smiling pianist in an illustrated setting with friendly-looking characters including happy drinkers, a cat on a couch, and a duck with a backstory. ...

Ochikochi is the 2013 album released from a trio of the same name consisting of Taiichi Kamimura on sax, Norikatsu Koreyasu on bass, and Manabu Hashimoto on drums. All songs are by the group’s front horn player Kamimura. It’s adventurous jazz music in the uninhibited hip style of rugged jazz legends like Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. Even through to the current day, when Kamimura plays live, he still often leads Ornette Coleman-style concerts and jam sessions at various jazz spots around Japan. ...

Struttin’ is saxophone player Ayumi Koketsu’s jazz quartet album released in Japan in 2010. This is her debut album, the first of over a dozen killer jazz albums that she has been releasing through the years, each filled with material ranging from straight-ahead, cool jazz, hard bop, ballads, bossa nova, and other themes. This first album features Koketsu on alto sax with her quartet of Yoshihiko Naya on piano, Masayuki Tawarayama on bass, and Mark Taylor on drums. ...

Jazz violinist maiko’s new album Reminiscence is a milestone release for the Tokyo-based musician. It’s both a look back at her start 25 years ago when she moved to Tokyo and began to play jazz, as well as a gratitude-filled mark of appreciation to the many musicians she’s played with and the experiences she’s had through her years of development as live musician in Japan’s music scene. This is her twelfth album spanning those many years, but her prior album Solo was released in 2018 so it’s been several years between that and this 2024 work. In her online notes for this album, she explains how the unsteady times for musicians during the coronavirus period sparked a period of reflection on her Tokyo-based musical life and introspection about her next musical statement. For this project, she choose nine new songs she had written during that period, and settled on the musical partners she would bring this new record to life with. The process involved thinking back over those formative years spent with these and other co-musicians, and especially her hometown of Kobe where it all began. ...

Rio is the first album from vocalist Rio Osawa, released in 2021 as a six song, 24 minute album of some favorite Brazilian and jazz bossa nova tunes. With an organically rooted acoustic sound true to the honored form, vocalist Osawa is joined by guitar on all six tracks, with additional wind instruments (sax, flute, harmonica), hand percussion, and occasional backup voices from the band adding call and response dialogue and accents to the music. The songs selected for this album are from four names recognizable as leading songwriters and producers of Brazilian music: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Roberto Menescal, Milton Nasciemento, and Caetano Veloso. Rio includes two songs each by Jobim and Menescal, and one each by Nasciemento and Veloso. ...

Ten to Sen is a 2025 release from the duo of percussionist Hitomi Aikawa and pianist Masaki Hayashi. On this album, Aikawa plays marimba, glockenspiel, hand drums, and other percussion instruments, and she composed most on the music as well. Hayashi plays piano on all songs and contributed one composition to the album. The duo’s music is harmoniously beautiful with an understated personality projecting a calm confidence, one that supports a balance of bold strokes and playful trepidation delivered by patient hands. The duo takes its time with gentle moments as well as the elevated dramatic energy of dots and lines swirling together on a canvas to create colorful stories. When not flowing free in rubato intros and sections, the duo locks into implied deep grooves and looped time-based phrases that repeat over one another, sometimes in offsets that create a crisscross of overlapping motifs combining simplicity and complexity all at once. It’s more soothing waves than sharp corners, still the playing is expert and precise. ...

Fuse is a 1999 album from saxophonist Toshihiko Inoue and his fuse quartet made up of Inoue on sax, Nobumasa Tanaka on piano, Benisuke Sakai on bass, and Ken Tsunoda (Tsunoken) on drums. After growing up with jazz and accumulating years of experience with other jazz musicians’ bands and albums, Inoue started his own quartet in 1998 right before recording and releasing this album. With the album title fuse, it was also the name for his quartet, and in this way, a sort of self-titled album as his debut release as a band leader and composer. ...

Trumpeter Yuto Komatsu released his second album Defune in 2025, introducing nine new songs performed by his quartet that includes Mikiko Nagatake on piano, Daisuke Ijichi on bass, and Makoto Rikitake on drums. This new album is a follow-up seven years in the making after his 2018 debut release Circle of Dreams, marking his journey through the pandemic years and noting what he picked up along the way. His love of music sustained him through that unpredictable period, one that was particularly hard on independent musicians, as he discusses a bit in the liner notes. ...

Listen to My Blues is a 2025 jazz release from saxophonist Wataru Hamasaki and pianist Akane Matsumoto. The two musicians are known for performing together many times at live events and recording sessions, including as co-leaders of their Big Catch Quartet, a classy orthodox jazz unit with a soulful, big jazz sound. Additionally, each musician is popular individually as a leader of their own groups, like with Hamasaki’s Encounter quartet, Matsumoto’s jazz piano trios, and as members of many other bands and combinations. ...

In Japan, Asuka Watanabe is a recognizable name for fans of old jazz standards and Japanese vocals. Her emergence in the live jazz scene in the early 2000s was elevated by her 2004 debut album, Unaffected. The album’s title fits the meaning of unpretentious sincerity, and that is what the music here is all about. Fans of classic jazz will appreciate Watanabe’s great selection of familiar tunes centered on her straight-forward singing without affectation, presented in the traditional format of a jazz vocalist backed up by a jazz piano trio. Her locked-in trio for this recording features equally Hideaki Yoshioka on piano, Koji Yamashita on bass, and Yoshitaka Uematsu on drums. ...

The jazz album Blending Tone is the 2012 debut release from the Tokyo-based Akihiro Yoshimoto Quartet. Saxophone player and leader Yoshimoto recorded this with a tightly bound group of musicians including Aaron Choulai on piano, Takuya Sakazaki on bass, and Shun Ishiwaka on drums, working together to blend their tones while staying on top of Yoshimoto’s music. The CD version of this album includes ten tracks running at 54 minutes of mostly original music from Yoshimoto. The popular jazz standard “Body and Soul” is the sole cover tune, played as duo of piano and sax as a gentle closing. ...

Pianist Yukari Sekiya released Duets Till Now, From Here fourteen years after her 2011 debut recording It’s Ordinary Love And…. This new album offers both a retrospective and a forward view of her music and musical partners through her years of playing. Duets is a two-disc album with 16 songs, and the temporal themes of past and future are reinforced by the label assigned to each disc, with disc one titled “Till Now” and two as “From Here”. ...

Yukari Sekiya (Sekichu) is a jazz pianist, composer, and free improvisationalist who released her first album in 2011 with the group Yukari Sekiya Trio with Yuko Tanaka. The Japanese title of this debut is ありふれた愛なので・・・ translated on the cover as It’s Ordinary Love And… Sekiya’s trio is completed by Michihiro Morisada on contrabass and Tatsuya Hashimoto on drums, and Yuko Tanaka joins as guest vocals and voice. This album is a live recording of seven of Sekiya’s original compositions, performed on one night in December 2010 at the jazz club Big Apple in Kobe. The four musicians all embrace spontaneous, simultaneous creation, and Sekiya’s music is wide open for creativity. Bounding several free jazz sections are the pianist’s composed musical themes and thoughts, written down on the page as clear melodies, structures, accents, and band signals that are coordinated parts of Sekiya’s musical design. At the same time, whole sections of several pieces are set free to allow the musicians to stretch out together. In those sections, the four members improvise freely but together as a group, reaching towards one musical mind, and building to wild crests of sound or subtle unified soundscapes as feelings and the moment dictate. ...

Kakusareta Guwa is a 2025 release from pianist Shikou Ito’s Trio Syncretia. A translation of the Japanese title, 隠された寓話, is also printed on the cover, and reads allegorical stories-shaded. Ito’s trio is a piano-bass-percussion combo, and their music is robust and detailed, soulfully rugged. The sounds from Gen Ogimi’s percussion kit are a change from the regular drum kit that is de rigueur for jazz piano trios, and the sounds of hand drums alongside the snare, toms, and cymbals add a lot of character and color to the music. Intuitively linked to the pulse and beat is bassist Benisuke Sakai, who enhances the rhythms through his firmly connected upright bass with both grounded and adventurous playing. ...

Jazz pianist Fumio Karashima’s 2006 album Great Time scratches the itch for a straight ahead jazz recording, bringing with it the satisfaction of the promised enjoyment conveyed by the title. Joining Karashima are Drew Gress on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, making up a trio of well-known and highly respected musicians in the jazz world. In particular, DeJohnette, who passed away in October 2025, was a worldwide legend whose influence has been immense. Fumio Karashima was also highly visible in the Japanese jazz world, and internationally to a lesser degree (admittedly, few musicians worldwide achieved DeJohnette’s level of fame). Yet, as an undeniable force and a recognized name in the jazz community, Karashima lived a life full of jazz, performing, touring, and recording for spans of years at at time with other jazz giants including American drummers Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, not to mention an abundance of amazing Japanese musicians. ...

The new album Orbital Resonance from Sumire Kuribayashi, released in September 2025, is the latest creative output from the popular Japanese jazz pianist and composer. This graceful album contains eight original songs performed by the trio of Sumire Kuribayashi on piano, Motohiko Ichino on guitar, and Kyrie Anderson on drums, with guest trumpeter Niran Dasika making it a quartet on three songs. For this release, two prominent jazz players from Australia join Kuribayashi and Ichino, yet Kuribayashi is no stranger to international connections. In addition to her frequent concerts in Japan, she’s performed with many non-Japanese musicians for overseas tours and recording sessions, including this album’s guest trumpeter Niran Dasika, who has recorded several of his past albums with Kuribayashi. ...

Yuri Hirota’s album Magical Moonlight was released in 2017 as a petite jazz gallery of some of her favorite songs and original compositions songs. These are played by pianist Hirota with her group,“Quartet Tsukino no Sampo” (月夜の散歩), which roughly translates to The Walk on a Moonlight Night Quartet. Although this is a slightly older album, Hirota announced recently that this album and her earlier release Flea Circus (2015) were now available on streaming platforms, making this a good time to refresh this short article about the album. ...

Anitya is pianist Harumi Nomoto’s fourth trio record, released in 2025. It’s been a decade-plus since the trio’s previous release Virgo (2014), with their earlier albums released as far back as 2007 and 2002, so it was a thrilling surprise when plans for a new recording were announced at one of their live shows early last year. The anticipation from their loyal fans rose in 2025 as the trio scheduled more concerts before the recording, to fine-tune the new songs and oil the performance gears at live concerts around Tokyo. Following that, Anitya was quickly recorded over two days in June and released in December 2025 right in the midst of a busy holiday season. ...

Guitarist Hiroshi Fukutomi’s first album is Rings of Saturn from 2010. On this recording, the guitarist plays modern jazz compositions under the flag of his own quintet featuring Masahiro Yamamoto on alto and soprano sax, Koichi Sato on piano (also on Fukutomi’s 2014 followup Memory Stones), Hiroshi Ikejiri on bass, and Ryo Shibata on drums. Fukutomi’s debut album runs for 54 minutes and features seven original compositions, six from Fukutomi and one from saxophonist Yamamoto. The songs are composed by Fukutomi to be platforms for interplay, where the front-most instruments of guitar, sax, and piano merge and relay with an intimate immediacy, rather than each musician stepping back to make room for longer periods of singular adlibs. As with great jazz combos, there’s close collaboration where all five members listen closely to one another, pick their moments to step forward or back, and raise or relax the tension with the right-timed notes and rhythms. ...

From 2022, Breathe Beneath the Sun is pianist Mikiko Nagatake’s second release, a jazz piano trio recording that came out just one year after her debut album Into the Forest (2021). With the same members as on her first album, her trio includes Ryoji Orihara on fretless bass and Sota Kira on drums, two popular players in many Tokyo jazz groups. Another similarity between Nagatake’s first two albums is the addition of special guest horn players on a few songs. While the first album featured saxophonist Nami Kano on a bonus track, this album features two more saxophone guests well-known in the world of Japanese jazz, Kosuke Mine and Eiichi Hayashi, who join Nagatake as special guests for one track each near the end of the album. ...

The 2023 release I’ll Be Home for Christmas is a pleasant holiday collection of seasonal music from Japanese pianist Harumi Nomoto. The 31-minute album is an unexpected departure from her usual releases, as her previous three trio albums are filled with her unique style of contemporary jazz, J Jazz, and various world genre influences that add interesting layers to straight-ahead trio music. In contrast to her signature Harumi Nomoto sound, this holiday release offers shorter, simpler, and sincerely played versions of traditional Christmas carols, hymns, pop Christmas tunes, classical whimsy, and modern pieces. Whereas her trio albums have been filled with Nomoto’s original material, only one of her original pieces appears here, tying up the album as a set closer like a ribbon on a wrapped present. ...

The Tree of Life is a 2019 jazz release from bassist Daiki Yasukagawa, pianist Hitomi Nishiyama, and violinist Maiko. These are three musicians who are each leaders of their own projects in Japan with many recordings, side projects, and frequent live schedules. Bassist Yasukagawa and pianist Nishiyama have worked as a duo before and released two albums together, but this album, with Maiko on violin, is the trio’s debut as “The Tree of Life”, a band name that they will continue to use on their followup albums Mahoroba (2021) and New Hope (2022). ...

Drummer Toru Takahashi’s debut album is Tokyo Groovin’ High, a 2021 release that presents addictive jazz bebop favorites performed by long-time musical partners and friends. This is a drummer-led album where Takahashi makes the most of arranging the musicians in various forms. With three different rhythm sections, the drummer plays with quartet and quintet forms, the classic piano trio, and even a septet featuring two special guests known for rakugo storytelling performances and television appearances. ...

Vocalist Kaoru Azuma’s Japanese debut release is Footprints in New York, recorded in New York in 2008 and released in Japan that same year. Coming two years after her independently released album The Water is Wide (2006), this was her first album to be released in Japan. Azuma does something a little different from typical jazz vocal albums, selecting songs for Footprints in New York that are great modern jazz tunes known originally and primarily as instrumental compositions. She covers a nice sample of jazz genres — bebop, hard bop, classic, contemporary, and so on — in what could be called a “non-standards” vocal jazz album, or a vocal jazz album for instrumental jazz lovers. Through this selection she also pays homage to master instrumentalists and composers including Chick Corea, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. And, of course, Wayne Shorter, through his composition “Yes or No” and the classic “Footprints” referenced in the album title. ...

Decision is a 2020 album from the duo of vibraphonist Reiko Yamamoto and pianist Sumire Kuribayashi. This is their second album together as the duo “sumireiko” and follows their 2013 debut release Blue Bird. The two musicians have been playing together for fifteen years since meeting and forming their group, and in that time have developed a deep friendship that permeates their music with this intuitive emotional bond. In fact, the name sumireiko was made by overlapping their first names, Sumire and Reiko, to create the name of their musical identity. Their first names, Sumire and Reiko, are even combined and overlapped to form their musical identity “sumireiko” (すみれ + れいこ = すみれいこ), another indication of their close musical affinity built on trust and friendship. ...