One of those personal heroes is saxophonist Kosuke Mine, who joins the group as a special guest and adds his engagingly vibrant tenor sax sound on five of the nine tracks. Those include two of the album’s peaks for excitement (the edge-of-your-seat #2 “Flip a Coin” and the funkily thrillseeking #5 “Maverick”) as well as Mine’s introspective ballad #7 “After the Checkout” where the two saxes converse over melancholy piano chords to set a dramatic scene.

Liner Notes

(Translated from Miyuki Moriya’s original Japanese liner notes.)

As always, thank you for picking up and listening to this album.

Although Beyond the Sea is my fourth album as a leader, it feels like a continuation of my first album Cat’s Cradle which I released in 2010. For this new recording, there are songs that I’ve been working on for years, new songs written for this album, and two songs by musicians whom I respect greatly. Since this is fully packed with nine songs (at over an hour!) I hope that you stick with me through to the end.

About the musicians, two have been with me for close to twenty years and played on my first album: pianist Mamoru Ishida and drummer Sohnosuke Imaizumi. Bassist Junichi Sato has been with this band since April 2021. Incidentally, being able to meet him was a trigger to making this album.

This time we were also joined by a special guest, the beloved saxophone player Kosuke Mine, who I have endless respect for both musically and as a human being.

When I was still a youngster in my early twenties (yes, there was such a time… haha) and a total beginner in jazz, I was looked after by the owner of a local jazz spot called Swing House in my hometown of Takamatsu. One day, a regular customer told me “Kosuke Mine is coming here, and you definitely should hear him!” So, when he came to perform as a touring member with guitarist Yoshiaki Masuo, that’s when I first met and heard Mine-san. (Mine-san probably doesn’t remember that time, but ever since then, he has been incredibly kind and wonderful to me!) I bought his /Major to Minor /album at the time, and it’s continuously been one of my favorites. To be honest, I only knew about bebop then, so it was a bit of a challenge at first. But every now and then, I would pull out the record, listen to it, and think “Wow, this is really, really cool!” And, the more I continued to play jazz, the more captivated I became by his sound and his playing. A few years later in Tokyo, I was able to meet Mine-san again, and I even stood on the same stage as him. The fact that the day finally came when I could play with him on my own leader album is truly like a dream come true. I feel very blessed.

I’ll briefly introduce the songs.

1. Cicada’s Blues (Miyuki Moriya)

This is a blues inspired by the life of a cicada. They say that some cicadas remain in the earth for seven years, but apparently, the type that lives in Japan only stays underground for four to five years at most. The fact that they only live for one week after emerging is based on observations under breeding conditions, and it seems that their actual lives and behavior are not well understood. It may be that their happiest times are sleeping deep in the earth while dreaming of the whole wide world.

2. Flip a Coin (Miyuki Moriya)

It means a coin toss. This song was written for this album, and the key is the slightly tricky bass line in the intro. I imagined the anticipation, the nervousness, and the thrill that can come at times when one is readying for victory or defeat, or taking a step into a new world while trying to suppress feelings of excitement.

3. 父母ヶ浜 (Miyuki Moriya)

There is a beach in my hometown in the Kagawa Prefecture where the sunsets are very beautiful. My grandmother’s house is nearby, so when I was young, I would go to swim in the sea there in the summer. It’s a wide, shallow beach, so at low tide, a large pool of water is formed and beautifully reflects the sky like a mirror. Recently, it’s become a very popular tourist spot, dubbed Japan’s Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flats).

4. Melancholy Marie (Miyuki Moriya)

This is a song I wrote to celebrate the birthday of Mariko-san, the cute wife of Miyazaki-san who runs the jazz bar Cochi in Koiwa. It’s a fun and relaxing place that I visit almost every month. The ever-kind Mariko-san always worries about her husband, as he loves alcohol a lot and sometimes drinks too much. They are an incredibly wonderful couple.

5. Maverick (Miyuki Moriya)

It means a lone wolf, a rebel. The barmaster of the jazz bar Salt Peanuts in Ekoda has been taking care of our band for many years. This tough character has seen the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun: Maverick at the movie theater more than 50 times! We choose the title of this song in appreciation for him.

6. Beyond the Sea (Miyuki Moriya)

I love the blue seas of Japan’s southern islands. I wrote this song during the self-isolation period in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, I was hoping to break free as soon as possible and escape to a southern island. In fact, I wrote this with inspiration taken from the song “The Color of Peace” by the wonderful pianist Hajime Yoshizawa.

7. After the Checkout (Kosuke Mine)

This is a beautiful ballad written by Kosuke Mine. It so goes that he wrote this song in the studio right after checking out of an establishment for mountain seclusion, where he would sometimes go alone in order to practice and compose. No matter how many times I play this song, I’m deeply moved. It’s one of my personal favorites.

8. PAPA Julian (Miyuki Moriya)

This is a swing number inspired by “Cannonball”, aka saxophone player Julian Edwin Adderley. I wrote this about twenty years ago and since then many people have performed it. It’s a piece that I’m personally pleased with, and it has become a familiar song at this band’s live performances.

9. After Dark (Hidefumi Toki)

This is a ballad by my esteemed instructor Hidefumi Toki. The person I have become today, who is able to continue playing jazz from then to now, is the result of my meeting Toki-san. I still treasure the things he taught me and the courage he gave me. It was an honor to be one of his students. With gratitude.

This album has a completely different atmosphere compared to my earlier two albums. My album from two releases ago, Mukashi Mukashi, paid respect to the free jazz of 1970s Japan. My previous release Uta Oto was inspired by nature, the Earth, and distant foreign lands. I hope that listeners who have been with me since earlier albums will enjoy this change. At the same time, I hope that new audiences who may be hearing me for the first time through this album will also be inspired to explore the different sides of Miyuki Moriya that I’ve created so far.

At the beginning of these liner notes, I mentioned that this album feels like a continuation of my first album. While our situations and environments have changed over the years, I’m extremely happy to be able to put out this work together. These great, hardworking musicians who I’ve played with up to now and into the future still remind me of the fresh and energetic feelings that I had when I first started playing.

守谷美由貴 Miyuki Moriya

Obi Notes

The sky, the breeze, the blue. Sax player Miyuki Moriya welcomes veteran tenor player Kosuke Mine as a special guest on her summer album that is making a splash.

Audio and Video

• Audio for “Beyond the Sea”, track #6 on this album:

• Short excerpt of the Miyuki Moriya Quartet playing “Cat’s Cradle” from her first album, live in 2011:

• Miyuki Moriya and Kosuke Mine playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” live at Tokyo’s Hot House in 2013:

• Audio for “Chichibugahama”, track #3 on this album

• Audio for “Maverick”, track #5 on this album

• Excerpt from track #2: “Flip a Coin”

In addition to playing original jazz with her long-running quartet, Moriya has also led less common formations including drummer-less trios (with sax, piano, bass), bass-less trios (sax, piano, drums), and chord-less trios (sax, bass, drums), as well as groups focused on the music of famous Japanese jazz musicians and composers.

On Uta Oto, Moriya leads a drum-less trio with pianist Nobumasa Tanaka and bassist Hiroshi Yoshino, generating a different energy with a loose, round sound without a standard quartet’s rhythmic drum hits and cymbal crashes, but a group that still creates locked-in rhythms and explosive energy when the music calls for it.

The seven tracks feature four originals, two songs by German composer Kurt Weill, and a Mongolian folk song. Soaring with authentic feelings, Miyuki’s originals: “Uta Oto” (beautiful sadness), “Art Nouveau” (lighthearted strolling), “M’s Dilemma” (wild whimsy), and “Sora wo Miru” (relaxing soulfulness). These distinctly original songs are set off by the two relatively darker Weill compositions with their staid tango and slow jazz shadows, and the atmospheric folk music with some natural and expertly wielded improvisation.

The album’s path through Moriya’s originals, traversing through two adjacent Weill songs and folk music, hints at a storytelling arc, from the multi-fold prologue through to hummable innocence, darker corners, free dissonance, human roots, and a final embrace by a soulful waltz. This journey and destination is like being welcomed to rest, comforting with feelings of home and hope. The sense of a spiritual aspect is not overt, but more like an undercurrent of soulfulness and a connection to nature displayed in both structured performance and unrestrained playing, and reinforced by the personal story laid out in the liner notes.

As for the album title and the uncommon word 詠音 (うたおと, Uta Oto), this is similar to everyday words for singing or reading (歌う, 読む). However, this word holds a deep and beautiful meaning as the sound of poetic reading from the heart with its melodic sounds or even chanting voices. This can be related to traditional Japanese poetic forms like haiku and tanka that convey deep meaning in few words with themes of nature, change, emotion, and contemplation. It adds an interesting dimension to this album, as it also makes its meaningful musical statement in poetic and soulful ways.

Liner Notes

(Translated from Miyuki Moriya’s original Japanese liner notes.)

Thank you everyone for picking up and listening to this album.

I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things every day since the unimaginable coronavirus pandemic began at the end of 2019. I myself caught the virus in November 2020 and was hospitalized for ten days after being infected.

In the middle of my hospital stay, I received a performance request from a place called No Room For Squares in Shimo-Kitazawa. While I was confined to bed and connected to an electrocardiogram, I reached out to pianist Nobumasa Tanaka and bassist Hiroshi Yoshino and asked them to play with me. That was how this group Uta Oto started.

Even though I’ve been playing music for a long time, my feelings haven’t changed that much since I first started playing jazz. I had spent my time doing as I like and at my own relaxed pace. But after being infected with the coronavirus, I realized anew that tomorrows aren’t guaranteed. I decided to try to accomplish what I want to now, as much as I can, and I asked these two musicians to record with me.

The first time I played with pianist Nobumasa Tanaka was at drummer Takeo Moriyama’s session at Lovely in Nagoya. On that day I had used up almost all my physical strength (that tends to happen every time I play with Moriyama, haha), so we ended up not speaking much afterward, and I arbitrarily imagined that Nobumasa Tanaka must be quite a scary person. But after that, when we played together at Hiroshi Yoshino’s gig, I realized that he was kind and cool with a mischievous streak and a beautiful piano style… but inside, he’s a crazy eccentric (meant in a good way, haha).

The first time I played with bassist Hiroshi Yoshino was at the famous spot Aketa no Mise in Nishi-Okigubo. I had played with many of Yoshino’s students by then, and I had often heard about Yoshi’s brilliance, so I was nervous to play with him. But from the first time we played together, I felt that Yoshino was a person as vast as the earth, who knew intensity and moreover expressed its warmth and depth through his sound. He is a broad-minded and wonderful person. Often when we perform, a strange thing happens as Yoshino can play a single note and cause a landscape to suddenly appear in front of my eyes.

That is all to explain how I’m extremely happen to be able to record this album with these two wonderful musicians.

1. 詠音うたおと (Uta Oto)

This is a song written for this group. Living creatures are reborn and become active with the sunrise. And as the earth’s blessed rain falls, and the following storm passes, calmness returns, and the sun sets… it’s that sort of a scene.

2. Art Nouveau

This is a word that refers to the new art movement that bloomed through central Europe. The song title was inspired by the song “Art Deco” by trumpeter Don Cherry. Personally speaking, I play this while fantasizing about old European streets.

3. Youkali Tango

This is a song composed for a play by the German composer Kurt Weill during his exile in Paris. It seems that Roger Fernay added French lyrics later. The lyrics describe a utopia called Youkali at the end of the world, but close at the end with the heartrending words “There is no such place anywhere”.

4. Liebeslied

Liebeslied means “love song”. This is a song composed by Kurt Weill and used in the musical play The Threepenny Opera. The flow from the intro’s bass melody into the piano theme is so beautiful and always makes me sigh no matter how many times I listen to it.

5. M’s Dilemma

The M of the title comes from the name of Mikiko Nagatake, a wonderful pianist whom I’ve had the opportunity to perform with a lot. I’ve played this song live with different people, and each time the different personalities surface with interesting developments. This time with Nobumasa and Yoshino, the rare genius of their performance took me to a new world.

6. 遥かな土地の蜃気楼 (A Mirage in a Distant Land)

Hiroshi Yoshino is active is not only jazz but various musical fields. When he introduced this Mongolian folk song to me and we played it for the first time, it felt strangely right to me. Since then it’s become one of my favorite songs. As we were making a trio recording, this was a song that I absolutely wanted to include.

7. 空を見る (Watch the Sky)

In the fall of 2020 during a period of unbearable anguish, I wrote this song as I thought about the places I missed and the people I wanted to see. On Uta Oto, it’s played as an instrumental, but there are lyrics for this song.

I’ve been living in Tokyo for about twenty years, and with coronavirus and other things piling up, it was a deeply troubling time, and for the first time last year I began to think things were impossible.

But on that day, when the three of us met and played the first notes together, the indescribable things that had been spinning around inside me for several months suddenly disappeared, turning into the utter joy of making music. In that sense, Nobumasa and Yoshino are irreplaceable lifesavers to me.

Music may not be able to cure disease, but I deeply believe that music can be a source of salvation. And I’ll continue to travel on my musical journey, striving to produce sounds that can someday make others feel that same way.

October 2021, Miyuki Moriya

(The liner notes end with a poem in Japanese. This is a humble attempt at a poetic translation to English.)

空を見る

空に手をかさねて風を見つける

花色に染まった大地を揺らす

目を閉じ思い出す小さな夢と記憶

涙で滲んだ夜にひろげた

星に手をかさねて月に詠うよ

遥か遠いあなたを思い出してる

Look at the sky

Hands together to the sky, find the wind

The flower-colored earth sways

Closed eyes recall small dreams and memories

Spread through the night blurred by tears

Hands together to the stars, sing to the moon

Remembering you, so far away

Audio and Video

• Promotional video with excerpts from all tracks on this album:

• Excerpt from track #1: “詠音～うたおと～ (Utaoto)”

Also distinguishing the sound is the edgy, metallic sound of the alto sax and the funky, crystalline drumming, with stylish planes of piano and guitar and gliding over the deeply full bass lines. Drummer Sohnosuke draws attention with a concentrated hip-hop energy driving the odd-meter songs, and, along with steady bass lines from Ikejiri, keeps the listener anchored even through unusual rhythms beyond standard swing patterns (see Sohnosuke’s Rin (2018) for similar sounds.)

Sharply-crafted jazz with a modern spark particularly identifies Moriya’s music, and with “Tuck Box”, “Matching Dice”, and the title track “Cat’s Cradle”, the sax player strives for originality by building riffs on challenging, odd-meters over which blistering improvisation can be laid down. These songs, as well as her sunny “Message” and soulful “Existence”, hit the bullseye at setting a mood, and are still favorites of Moriya’s fans today and often performed at live concerts to welcoming audiences. Balancing the energy are a few ballads as well, including a piano/sax duo on the emotive ballad “Just A Gigolo”, a melancholy goodbye wrapping up the album.

Audio and Video

• Excerpt from track #1: “Tuck Box”