Almost Dusk is a 2019 album from the duo of pianist Yoko Kobayashi and drummer Kazumi Ikenaga. Their beautifully imaginative music is flexibly arranged, somewhat abstract, but solidly grounded to the music they have written upon which they improvise with linked hands and minds. The duo’s playing roams across their compositions as they tune into to themselves and to one another for in the moment inspiration and stimulation, simultaneously creating, responding, pausing, and reflecting. The written notes of their compositions are also guided by the images and stories that bind the music to their visions, whether it’s signals from outer space, precious childhood memories, or the beauty uncovered in slow daily life. ...

Echoes is the title of the second album from the Fumie Chiba Trio, made up of pianist and composer Fumie Chiba, bassist Tetsuji Koji, and drummer Kaoru Suzuki. This forty-nine minute album from 2013 contains ten original songs from Chiba and includes eight songs played by the trio and two for solo piano. Chiba’s trio playing style is modern contemporary jazz with rock-leaning straight beats and composed bridges, interludes, and heavy vamps that all add extra flair around melodies and jazz improvisation. ...

Astrolabe is an imaginative 2012 album from pianist and composer Hitomi Nishiyama. Nishiyama created the songs and this album with two goals in mind: First, she wanted to compose a story-like suite, a long-form composition that reflected the influence of guitar-based music she listened to as a youth, especially rock and heavy metal. Second, she wanted to record and release an album in a duo format with guitarist Takayoshi Baba, who joins her on this album. ...

Organ Jazz Club Abecafe is a special jazz bar whose defining feature is the Hammond B3 Organ, a characteristic instrument in jazz that could almost define a subgenre in and of itself. OJC highlights this wonderful tradition of jazz organ by establishing itself a place that knows what it wants to do and does it extremely well. Figure 1: Drums and organ at Organ Jazz Club Abecafe in 2019 ...

The Word (2025) is the second collaboration album from guitarist Davy Mooney and drummer Ko Omura. As with their previous release Benign Strangers (2018), each leader contributes five original songs to the album, interspersed in squence. The music is played by the same quintet of Mooney on guitar, Omura on drums and tabla, John Ellis on saxes and bass clarinet, Glenn Zaleski on piano, and Matt Clohesy on bass. From first track, Omura’s “Sheep Wash”, you can immediately sense the great balance of dynamic energy and relaxed sweetness. The song’s bright swing and memorable melody initially seems simple but contains the subtle complexity of unexpected turns and rhythmic shifts. These qualities are found in all the superb writing and playing from Omura and Mooney, and the songs end up being finely crafted realizations of straight singable melodies that also act as reference ground for solo improvisations. While Omura plays drums on this first track, his devoted study to Indian tabla and music seem to be ingrained in his musical thinking as well, more so when he plays tabla and picks titles from Sanskrit words and concepts. (A different version of Omura’s “Sheep Wash” can be heard on Fe: Live at Virtuoso.) ...

Saxophone player Toshiki Abe’s first album is titled The Simplicity. It was released in 2022 under the name of his band the Toshiki Abe Life Memory Project, a trio formed just one year early as a channel for Abe’s original music. This group features Abe on sax, Sayaki Kishi on organ, and Tetsunori Morinaga on drums, resulting in a funky sax/organ/drums sound that works perfectly with Abe’s soulful compositions. While Abe’s band name “Life Memory Project” sounds as if it could be a type of memorial service product that adjoins death and melancholy (the mistaken assumption I originally had), it has a completely different meaning centered around life. The concept represents his goal of capturing and directing the daily events and life changes through his music. It’s similar to how a dairy is used to record the days’ happenings, but instead of capturing the past in notes, Abe directs his music and life forward by intention through his compositions, recorded music, and live events. It’s like a forward-looking planning system specifically constructed to pay attention to the immeasurably special value of each day. ...

Introduction There are some common impressions of hurdles that newcomers need to overcome with live jazz performances, and challenges with jazz in general for beginners. Jazz bars and clubs can seem hard to enter, especially on your own, and for the first time. What is the payment system? What music, and from which albums, is being played? Is it written down music, pure improvisation, noise? What’s a performance versus a jam session? When do I clap? ...

Sweet is the title of percussionist Hitomi Aikawa’s debut album. It was recorded and released in Japan in 2018 and contains fourteen of her compositions. A multi-instrumentalist, Aikawa plays various instruments on the songs and is joined on many of them by special guests Masaki Hayashi and Eri Uenoyama on piano, Hiroshi Suzuki on woodwinds, and Megumi Hattori on vibraphone. As for the instruments Hitomi Aikawa is using on each track, the details are not listed on the CD or in the liner notes. However, clues can be found on her website, where a list of her percussion collection is displayed, and it can be fun to use your ear to try and figure out which instruments are producing the sounds you hear as you listen to Sweet. Her large percussion collection numbers in the dozens and ranges from mallet instruments (vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, glockenspiel), hand drums (djembe, cajón, congas, bongos, timbales), tambourines, castanets, triangle, cymbals, chimes, blocks, Afro-Latin instruments, and many others. ...

Mowna is a 2024 album from bassist and composer Hiroyuki Yamaguchi. For this release, Yamaguchi wrote and arranged all nine tracks, which he recorded with a quintet composed of several musicians that played on his previous album Inner Perception (2018) by his Thursday Night Sextet, a band formed through jam sessions at the Tokyo jazz bar and local institution Manhattan. On Mowna, the returning members from Yamaguchi’s sextet are Hiroko Mase on soprano sax, Hinata Ishii on tenor sax, and bassist Yamaguchi, and newly added members for this release are pianist Toshihiko Kohno and drummer Tomoyuki Okabe. ...