The album brims with brilliant acoustic music full of clear harmonies and patiently developed melodies. The music reflects abstract themes represented by words in the song titles like movement (ways, roads), water (blue, dew, tides), and belonging and comfort (home, let me). The music is not abstract, however, but pinned down with the strength of conviction and personality that each player brings to the music. Each’s player’s identity does not dissolve in the trio but combines to create a new sound that is the sum of the parts. While there is, at first brush, a seemingly slow-moving surface that may describe meditative music as with a yoga playlist or a quiet church setting, there is an undertow of jazz, pop, blues, classical, free, and folk influences throughout. (It’s may be a high bar, but as a sound reference, think of concepts like Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert…). There is depth and nuance in the confident calm, in the ebb and flow. Quietness and patience allow for the trio’s delicate touches to be more noticable and emotionally powerful. It’s not overwhelming, not sparse, but comfortingly present, familiar, pervasive.

Liner Notes

(Translated from Akiomi Hirano’s original Japanese liner notes.)

A day spent surrendering ourselves to making music as a trio.

We are grateful to be able to share this one-day, once-only performance with you.

Kazuma Fujimoto

I wish for the music to accompany the subtle lyricism hidden in fleeting everyday moments and memories.

Takashi Sugawa

For example, a deep shining ultramarine, a glittering emerald green swaying in a gentle breeze, a violet or azure blue that changes expression with every glance. Waves of multiple sounds coexist and overlap and expand like tides before they return to being calm. I imagined such a scene while listening to the finished recording. With love and gratitude to the wonderful team who assisted with this project, and to everyone who is listening.

Sumire Kuribayashi

A divine combination

It can be described only as a divine combination.

It’s a happy moment particularly encountered in live jazz.
A phenomenon where a special sound emerges only by the combination of certain players, a matter of chemistry that can’t be predicted or planned in advance. Even when it does happen, it’s a delicate configuration where the magic could be lost if one member is absent or substituted with another musician.

Although the mechanism of creation may not be understood, it’s clear that it does not happen through top-down commands or orders. Rather, it’s the opposite of having too strong a direction. The basis is formed by equality and a mutually inspirational relationship between the members.

Strong personalities to inspire each performer, advanced skills to protect the music no matter what happens, creative ambition to expand individual musical potential… Perhaps only musicians who possess these three qualities meet the requirements for a divine combination.

However, assembling musicians who meet these requirements does not necessarily guarantee that the magic will happen. You won’t know unless you try, and the success rate is not very high. To put it plainly, it’s almost like winning the lottery, and not something that is created deliberately through intention.

I recently had the good fortune to witness this special unit, this divine combination. It was this drumless trio that I saw at Shibuya’s long-running jazz bar Body & Soul in June 2023.

I was very familiar with the three musicians, Sumire Kuribayashi, Kazuma Fujimoto, and Takashi Sugawa. But this was the first time I had seen them together. As it turned out, this wasn’t surprising, since this was their first gig together.

The music from these three musicians, filled with unique nuances, resembled nothing else I knew of. Without any hesitation, I proposed an offer to record them.

Following that, they played three gigs in preparation for the recording. With each one, they improved the precision of their sound and increased their level of sophistication even further.

Strong-willed yet elegant, natural yet meticulous. The result is that it’s beautiful without being cluttered.

These three know the virtues of acoustic music well, and their sound is gracefully shaped in an open space with lots of room for expression.

Their sound is worthy of special mention, as although it is tightly bound together for a cohesive sound as a mass feeling, each person’s individuality distinctly stands out as well. This unified yet multi-faceted aspect allows the sound of each to be heard clearly.

I wanted many jazz fans to be able to experience this irreplaceable sound. That was the wish that led me to produce this work.

Each of the three musicians works with their own bands made up of first-class musicians of different styles to expand the possibilities of expressing themselves.

Apart from her jazz influences, Sumire Kuribayashi was raised in a musically rich environment that included a koto master for a father, and she was blessed to hear a variety of music in her youth. While still young, she released her debut album in 2014, and after that she continued to release original records as a front-line pianist. What’s particularly noteworthy is that her traits and characteristics are unlike anyone else. Her individual style and underlying foundation are powerfully flexible yet unshakable.

Kazuma Fujimoto was also influenced by his father, who was a guitarist and singer-songwriter. He took up the guitar and formed the band Orange Pekoe in 1998. While gaining accolades for a unique sound that transforms diverse musical elements through his own interpretations, he is also active in the jazz scene and expanding his solo activities. Along with his radiant and beautiful personal tone, his lyrical and melodious original songs have also received high praise.

Takashi Sugawa has had close ties with Days of Delight starting with the recording of his band Banksia Trio. He is a renowned top bassist in the jazz world both in name and substance. He receives continuous requests to perform with musicians of all types, not only due to how he expands the band sound with his creative playing style, but also through the high-quality stimulation that his musical intelligence provides to his co-performers. To hear his sound is to immediately recognize it as his inherent texture.

The biggest effect of the sound that these three create is that it is not a simple sum or mathematical average, but an amalgamation of the whole into one body of mass. Figuratively speaking, it is more like a derived compound rather than building blocks.

However, this does not mean that their personalities are buried within the whole. As mentioned before, their individual identities are firmly noticeable. That is the crucial point.

While the three maintain their strong individuality (that is, each keeping their musical presence), they create a new overall picture. That is exactly the grounds for the truly divine combination that is a unique virtue of this band.

At the rehearsal before the recording, what impressed me was how everyone was refining their sound while sharing ideas without compromising themselves to match the others. Their thoughts were along the lines of “What should we do to make the group sound good,” and the approach of “Let’s constrain ourselves to avoid making waves” was not entertained.

The music recorded here by these three is the result of a conscious choice to preserve their individual personalities. It may be a paradox, but their organic connection is realized as the three reject musical interdependence and reliance and avoid easy harmony.

Why does this combination produce a special effect? Naturally, they have no awareness of it, so it cannot be explained.

It’s interesting that, despite the musicians being old friends who hold mutual respect for one another, for some reason, they didn’t have the opportunity to play together until now.

Each knows the other’s virtues and respects their musicianship. They had experiences as pairs [duos] but had none as a trio. These were the circumstances when I saw them on their first gig. This was the situation that sparked my sudden decision to record them.

When a jazz insider is gathering musicians for a live event or recording, there are two basic approaches. Should you channel the power of the musicians to express your desired musical vision? Or, conversely, should you leave everything up to the musicians and see what happens?

“But, this time it was a little different, you know.” This is how Sumire Kuribayashi described it, as she was the one who first considered this combination of players. For example, the songwriting process was different from usual.

“When I am songwriting, I always concentrate on bringing the music out of myself. Before thinking about the instrumentation or which musicians to partner with, I write to express myself purely. But this time, I was thinking of these two musicians from the start. Listening intently to their music, I had reactions like “Oh, this phrase is so pretty!” and “I like this intro!”, and I began to write songs filled with these ideas.

It’s not about shaping the music to one’s own vision, or about simply enjoying a carefree jam session. In other words, it is a third path. What can be discerned behind her words is the joy of making music as a trio and her respect for the other two members.

What types of musical perspective and musicianship do they have in common?

Kazuma Fujimoto’s words hint at this.

“My ideal is that the music lets you hear the heartbeat, that is, a heart-connected highly pure performance… to put out my inner self directly without any filters. In fact, I can sense this same characteristic in the other two musicians.”

He continues: Moment by moment, I want to express the scene and the images that arise without processing them. I also feel this with the other two. Perhaps it sounds good because they share the same feeling of what is important to extract from the music.

Consideration is a factor, but constraint is not. Respect, not submission. Inspiration, not control.

It must be this integrated position that the three share that is the basis of their unified yet multi-faceted music.

It’s not something that everyone can do, of course. At a minimum, preserving this attitude requires sustaining an appropriate distance from others while maintaining control of yourself, regardless of how much the situation changes. It’s easy to say, but difficult to accomplish.

This group constantly maintains the right distance from each other without breaking, so they can maintain a comfortable state no matter where they go. Therefore, there is no need to sacrifice themselves and yield to another in order to adapt to them.

Thinking about it, all three are gifted with exceptional hearing and can assess the situation quickly. Their reaction times are fast, and their physical abilities are excellent. They are always seeing everything from above. These are the same qualities that top athletes possess.

It may be that only athletes can create a new overall picture imbued with their strong individuality. When I see the trio of Sumire Kuribayashi, Kazuma Fujimoto, and Takashi Sugawa, I truly think so.

平野暁臣 Akiomi Hirano
(Days of Delight)
Founder/Producer

Obi Notes

Sumire Kuribayashi / Kazuma Fujimoto / Takashi Sugawa Tides of Blue
A gathering of three musicians who know the virtues of acoustic music well!
An unparalleled chemistry created by leading personalities in the Japanese jazz world!

“Strong-willed yet elegant, natural yet meticulous. The result is that it’s beautiful without being cluttered. These three know the virtues of acoustic music well, and their sound is gracefully shaped in an open space with lots of room for expression.” — Akiomi Hirano (from the liner notes)

Audio and Video

• Promotional video for this album:

• Sumire Kuribayashi and Kazuma Fujimoto playing “Road”:

• Bassist Takashi Sugawa’s Banksia Trio:

• Excerpt from track #2: “The Ways To Come Back Home Again”

Through the album’s eleven tracks and thirty-six minutes, Yoshimoto and Sugawa play free jazz and experimental music that pushes beyond the boundaries of standard jazz. The pair avoids the more easily identifiable trademarks of conventional music and songwriting to chase the free-flowing exchange of spontaneous ideas and sounds with few limits imposed.

The ingredients are Yoshimoto on soprano sax and clarinet, Sugawa on cello and contrabass, and beautiful inspiration. The result is filled with eccentric and atonal aspects: wild flights of notes punctuated with wavering drones, careful twining of improvised melodies, and knife-edge slices of notes forming and dissipating in unsettling conditions.

That said, it’s not an album full of noise or ambient effects (though the Bandcamp page for the album does include the tags ambient and dark ambient, along with jazz, contemporary jazz, and freejazz). Horn notes fly around in unpredictable paths, pouring phrases into the air while low notes percolate, bass notes pop and ring, and bowed strings expose eerie terrains.

To some, free jazz may sound like turbulent chaos, dissonant and abstract. Adventurous listeners (especially those searching for new sounds or a break from the ordinary) may appreciate these trips through unexplored territory. On Oxymoron, it is as if two pioneers are making discoveries through risky experiments that cause tuneful chirps, singing tones, and the evocative plucking, strumming, and bowing of bass string notes.

The songs played on Oxymoron seem to be sketched out with anything from simple outlines and thematic concepts to written-out intros and endings. Listening closely and wondering how much is pre-composed and how much is pure ad-libbing can be part of the experience.

The duo’s risk-taking and randomness increase the thrill of the musical search and the potential for invention. (As an aside, this so-called or apparent randomness is something that must be some part of the challenge of playing free jazz that doesn’t just sound like randomness: the musicians must consciously hurdle over or push back against instincts honed by endless hours of accurate drilling and correct practice that have set certain rules and patterns in concrete, both in the mind and muscle memory… to constantly and attentively resist the pull of falling back to using common scale patterns and licks, home keys, chord progressions, and forms that become unconscious gravitational forces for the experienced jazz musicians who have played through and memorized hundreds of standard tunes.)

Many of the songs on Oxymoron are just a few minutes long in the two- to three-minute range. These are briefly visited ideas that the duo stops, examines, and moves on from like waypoints on the journey as they continue to move forward and explore new ideas.

For ideas that are explored a bit more, the longest tracks on the album include two four-minute songs and one ten-minute song.

Track #3 “Password” slowly raises the temperature with sugary bursts of carbonation like curved melodic strands whipping with barbed ends. Sugawa sits out for a minute before rumbling in with fast nonstop bass lines underneath.

The three-part “Mokume” series (tracks #4, #8, and #10) has a particular impact. Clarinet and bowed cello notes play an almost modern classical piece before intermittently droning against one another. Consonance and dissonance slide around like oil and water shifting in a laboratory dish, flowing and touching but unmerging. Musical tones shift, intersect, tangle, and separate like frictional sounds of gossamer silk, like cricket legs or cobweb threads rubbing together, like bubbles of Brownian motion rising from a cauldron’s brew.

The final ten-minute track #11 “Enpitsu Hiko” finds the duo expanding to a trio as the sax and bass are joined by piccolo trumpet (played by Niran Dasika). Playful mayhem is entertained as the trio balances on a tightrope of unity and disarray. Roaming improvisation leads to unintelligible scrambles of speech and juggling of squeaks, pitches, and volume before ending with a satisfyingly clear, slightly bluesy conclusion.

Audio and Video

• Excerpts from a live performance of Oxymoron Duo in 2021 at Velvet Sun in Tokyo, Japan:

• Album audio on Bandcamp

• Excerpt from track #4: “Mokume #1”

The tracks are solidly modern jazz tunes, with sizzling improvisation from Yoshimoto and pianist Choulai melodically laying out fiery, stimulating lines. There are a few moments of avant-garde exploration, where Sugawa’s bowed bass is used extremely effectively.

A brooding atmosphere arises on #4 “Nostalgic Farm” and especially #7 “Ice Castle”, where a museum-like calm settles, foreboding and somewhat Nordic with its dark, chilling sound. There’s even a bit of goofy humor on two songs (#2 “The Mystery of Onion Rings” and #6 “Reminiscing About Banana Beer”), where Monkish exuberance and swing add a loose, jolly balance to the album.

The two longest tracks, #5 “Sabaku No Akari” and #8 “Water Drops”, build patiently. These two compositions portray Yoshimoto’s thoughtful and edgy songwriting strength, masterfully refined in balancing honed compositions with space for group dynamics and spontaneity.

These tracks and #3 “Possom” also summon a sense of Wayne Shorter’s modern quartet. This is exciting jazz with unextinguishable energy powered locomotively by drummer Ishiwaka and bassist Sugawa. All throughout, Yoshimoto’s liquid tenor swings over the chords like a daredevil trapeze artist, flowing and moving colorfully in impressive patterns.

Liner Notes

(Translated from the original Japanese liner notes written by Toshihiko Hoshino, music writer.)

Often, when seeing the children of family members after a long time, you can be surprised at how much they’ve grown. I was struck by a similar sensation when I heard this album. This was in spite of the fact that I went to almost all of this group’s live shows in Tokyo and should have recognized their growth firsthand.

The debut release Blending Tone from the Akihiro Yoshimoto Quartet pairs the ideal combination of allies Akihiro Yoshimoto and Aaron Choulai with the addition of the youthful rhythm section of Takashi Sugawa and Shun Ishiwaka. This was an epoch-making album from 2012.

A band grows by keeping its members fixed and regularly performing together. When I listened to Blending Tone and Moving Color in succession, a clear evolution in the band’s sound became apparent.

There are two dimensions to this evolution: maturity and transformation. Maturity refers firstly to the greatness of the Yoshimoto and Choulai combination. This is exactly what the phrase “Aun breathing” (two people performing together in sync and in harmony) is all about. In particular, hats off to Choulai, who perfectly understands Yoshimoto’s musicality and adds his own unique musical personality to it. There are probably not many pianists with such chord stacking, striking, timing, and pace that can be heard just from their backing accompaniment.

The beautiful interaction between tenor sax and piano on the ballad “Nostalgic Farm” is breathtaking. On “The Mystery of Onion Rings”, while the style is contemporary, traditional jazz roots are also filled with humorous playing through their personally-stamped homage to good old-fashioned jazz. For encores, this band often plays standards like ballads and bebop tunes, and being able to mix cutting-edge originals with traditional standards without any sense of unease is an example of the depth of their understanding.

While the previous release Blending Tone was aiming towards a band sound, it’s undeniable that Yoshimoto’s and Choulai’s collaboration played a large role at that time. Yet with each live performance by the band, the rhythm section’s involvement grew larger and the band’s individuality became established. This transformation is one of the key successes of this album.

It would not be improper to say that Shun Ishiwaka has become the number one young player today. Not only in this quartet, but Ishikawa and Choulai have also involved each other in their own groups, maintaining an unshakably trusting relationship. Highlights of their live performances include the moments when Ishiwaka and Choulai react through eye contact and engage aggressively with Yoshimoto’s tenor.

Check out Ishiwaka’s drumming in “Sabaku No Akari” behind Choulai’s piano solo, when a switch is suddenly flipped and the drums start pounding away. Just at the point behind the piano solo where Ishikawa may have gone too far to the edge of collapse, Choulai responds and starts to play furiously. Their momentum continues as the two fiercely and mercilessly challenge Yoshimoto’s tenor, a highlight of the middle portion of the album.

In December 2012, bassist Takuya Sakazaki left the group and Takashi Sugawa joined as a new member. Sugawa has been a long-standing member of the Terumasa Hino group and can be called the number one young bassist. He’s also an old friend of Yoshimoto and Choulai. While Sakazaki’s bass was of the unsung hero type, Sugawa’s bass is a type that aggressively connects with the front. The addition of Sugawa also resulted in a clear transformation of the band’s sound, such as the bowed melody on “Ice Castle” and the avant-garde solo on “Reminiscing About Banana Beer”.

The culmination of this evolution surely must be the last number, “Water Drops”. The mysterious melody is covered in darkness, led by a striking bass phrase. Yoshimoto’s tenor starts quietly, uses bold low-note phrases effectively, and ascends towards the climax. Perfectly closing in on this tenor, Choulai’s piano comping shape-shifts like a kaleidoscope, adding an amazing sense of color. Ishiwaka’s drums respond to the soloist’s phrases instantly and inject explosive energy.

Yoshimoto’s excellent music and leadership together with the strong individuality of the members has resulted in a band sound that has come to fruition. At over eight minutes, and the longest performance on the album, this dense world of sound doesn’t reveal any flaws and shines brightly on this album.

The shape of Akihiro Yoshimoto Quartet, which has achieved remarkable growth, was recorded in February 2014. As they continue to evolve day by day, we look forward to the sounds they express when they next appear before us.

Toshihiko Hoshino 星野利彦 / Music Writer

Audio and Video

• The Akihiro Quartet playing live in 2012:

• Excerpt from track #5: “Sabaku No Akari”