Hiroshi Suzuki

Hiroshi Suzuki was twenty-four when he made Variation for CBS/Sony, a label primarily in the business of selling Japanese pop to a mass audience. The record reflects that context: it's polished, melodically pleasant, and aimed at listeners who wanted jazz flavor without jazz difficulty. Suzuki is already a skilled trombonist, the tone warm and centered, but the material doesn't ask much of him.

The arrangements are lush and radio-friendly, the rhythm section conventional, and the overall feel is of an intelligent musician working within significant commercial constraints. You can hear the potential that Cat would eventually realize, but only in glimpses: a turn of phrase that goes somewhere unexpected, a tonal color that the arrangement can't quite contain.

Variation is worth knowing as the starting point of Suzuki's recorded career. It tells you where he began: in the commercial mainstream of late-sixties Japanese music, talented enough to stand out from the session players around him but not yet in a context where that talent could fully emerge.

Up Up and Away is a covers record: American pop hits of the late sixties processed through Suzuki's trombone and a Japanese studio orchestra. The title track, written by Jimmy Webb, suits the trombone's register well enough, and Suzuki's reading has a buoyancy that elevates it above pure session work.

The format asks Suzuki to be a conveyor of familiar melodies rather than an improviser, and he does it professionally. There are passages where his tone takes on a slightly different quality, more personal and less presentational, and those moments are the ones worth listening for. The rest is competent commercial jazz-pop of its era.

Up Up and Away is for the completist rather than the casual listener. It tells you more about the Japanese music industry of the period than it does about Suzuki's musical personality, which is exactly the situation that CBS/Sony's brief was designed to produce.

The best of the CBS/Sony records, Trombone Standard Deluxe gives Suzuki the material he needed: jazz standards that had been road-tested for decades and that rewarded genuine improvisation rather than melodic decoration. With Masahiko Sato at the piano, one of the most adventurous Japanese jazz pianists of his generation, the sessions have a different quality from the earlier commercial dates.

Suzuki's ballad playing here is genuinely lovely. His trombone has a singing quality that suits the slow and medium tempos of the standard repertoire, and he phrases with more rhythmic freedom than the pop cover sessions allowed. You can hear the trombonist who would make Cat seven years later, not fully formed but recognizably present.

Trombone Standard Deluxe is the record where Suzuki found his material, even if he hadn't yet found the fully personal context for it. It's a strong jazz record by any measure, and the best argument for tracking down the CBS/Sony years beyond the obvious Cat.

Trombone Deluxe is a sequel to Standard Deluxe in format and only slightly behind it in quality. Suzuki returns to the jazz standard repertoire with a slightly enlarged rhythm section and a more varied program, moving between uptempo swingers and the ballads where his tone is most fully itself.

The record has a slightly more relaxed atmosphere than its predecessor, as if Suzuki and the rhythm section had spent enough time together to stop being careful and start being musical. The best moments have an easy confidence that the tighter, more formally arranged date occasionally lacked.

Trombone Deluxe and its predecessor together form the strongest part of the CBS/Sony catalogue: two records of genuine jazz rather than jazz-adjacent pop, made by a musician who was still growing into his voice but already had enough of it to make the sessions worth hearing.

Six years passed between Trombone Deluxe and Cat, and whatever Suzuki did with that time transformed him. Cat is one of the great records in the Three Blind Mice catalogue and one of the most beautiful jazz records made anywhere in the seventies. The trombone playing is so far beyond what the CBS/Sony records suggested that they feel like documents from a different musician.

The opening track 'Cat' sets the album's tone immediately: a groove that builds from the rhythm section up, Akira Ishikawa's drums precise and propulsive, Hiromasa Suzuki's electric piano laying down atmospheric chords, and Hiroshi Suzuki's trombone arriving above it all with a warmth that is physical rather than just aesthetic. The sound of his tone on this record is one of those things that makes you want to replay the first ten seconds repeatedly just to re-experience the initial sensation.

Cat became one of the most sought-after records in the Japanese jazz market for good reason. It is the complete expression of what TBM's aesthetic aimed for: music that is impeccably played, deeply felt, and immediately and lastingly beautiful without any of those qualities undermining the others. The fact that it was Suzuki's final significant recording makes it both a masterpiece and a mystery. He found his voice exactly once and left it on tape for us.