Sketches by Motohiko Ichino is a 2007 jazz album featuring Ichino’s guitar trio and quartet playing his original music. At one hour and 5 minutes, the ten songs lay out an atmospheric and subtle sound, one where Ichino’s tonally rich guitar swings and sways with a warm, vintage electric sound through his songs.

Ichino’s guitar is in the spotlight, naturally, as this is a guitarist’s album featuring his original compositions. As a guitar trio with acoustic bass and drums, Ichino takes up most of the melodic and harmonic duties as he spins the chord structures, theme statements, and most of the solo improvisation over the precise drum and bass structures.

Ichino’s jazz guitar tone is another big part of the sound of this album. His softly electric sound is treated with subdued effects to surround the tones with comfortable waves of warble and warp and ever so slight overdrive grit. It balances his fluid playing well as he rings out plush chords and improvises, painting notes like light suspended in the vaults of churches, tinted and echoey.

Together, the trio creates music that is on different tracks patiently gentle, relentlessly driving, hypnotically oscillating, wandering and dreamy, and joyfully syncopated. With creative time signatures like three, four, five, and seven, and pulses of straight-eights, soft brushed jazz, and light rock, a great time feel continues throughout the album with ample variety.

Among the ten trio tracks are three songs and one short jam where saxophonist Taiichi Kamimura joins the trio with a bright and edgy horn sound that, like Jan Garbarek’s, balances so well with the richly resonant trio for some of the album’s most stimulating highlights.

Obi Notes

Memories of scenes from the mind’s eye. Ten sketches of sound.

Motohiko Ichino was born in Kobe. He studied at Berklee College of Music under Mick Goodrick (guitar) and others. He is a winner of the Gibson Jazz Guitar Contest in 2003. He currently plays in trios, quartets, solo improvisation, ELECTRON-4 project, and others at shows with a base at Shinjuku Pit Inn. He is also a member of groups including the Ryosuke Hashizume (tenor sax) Group and the Taiichi Kamimura (tenor sax) Quartet.

Sketches by Motohiko Ichino

• Motohiko Ichino - guitar
• Hikaru Toho - acoustic bass
• Shinichiro Kamoto - drums
• Taiichi Kamimura - tenor sax (#2, 5, 6, 10)

Released in 2007 on Ammonite Musique as AM-1001.

Japanese names: 市野元彦 Ichino Motohiko 東保光 Toho Hikaru 嘉本信一郎 Kamoto Shinichiro かみむら泰一 Kamimura Taiichi

Audio and Video

• Audio for “Tony”, track #2 on this album:

• Audio for “Sketch”, track #10 on this album:

• A live version of “Childhood”, track #5 on this album:

• Excerpt from track #1: “Wrapped Up”

Jazz of Japan #253 • Jul 26, 2024 • Brian McCrory

Related albums: Wordless (2006), Frozen Dust (2011), Acoustic Fluid (2012), Visible/Invisible (2013), National Anthem of Unknown Country (2014), Melancholy of a Journey (2016), The Torch (2016), Incomplete Voices (2017), Faces (2020)