Japanese Jazz

Ryo Fukui was a self-taught pianist from Hokkaido who discovered jazz records in his twenties and became obsessed. Scenery was his debut and it sounds like someone who has been listening with complete attention: the voicings are sophisticated, the touch is distinct, and there's a restraint that feels genuinely Japanese rather than imitative. He covers Bud Powell and Bill Evans and plays them like they're his own material because by the time he recorded this they basically were.

"Scenery" (the original) is the highlight: a rolling, meditative piece that doesn't resolve the way you expect it to. This record was pressed in tiny quantities in 1976 and sold for almost nothing. Now it sells for several hundred dollars and deserves every penny.

Cat is the album that turned Japanese jazz from a niche collector obsession into an Instagram aesthetic and that's both a compliment and a mild complaint. The cover is beautiful, the music is beautiful, and neither of those things is a coincidence. Hiroshi Suzuki plays trombone with a warm, singing quality that's unusual for the instrument: not brassy or aggressive, but lyrical, almost sighing.

Hiromasa Suzuki on keyboards creates a slightly electric shimmer underneath that places it right at the intersection of straight jazz and early fusion. The title track is worth the price of admission alone. Three Blind Mice albums pressed for the Japanese domestic market are notoriously hard to find in good condition, which is why the We Release Jazz reissue has been so welcome. This record stands on its own even if you've never seen the cover.

Isao Suzuki is a bassist who leads from the front rather than anchoring the back, and on Blow Up he plays with a melodic freedom that makes the bass feel like the lead voice it rarely gets to be. Kunihiko Sugano brings a searching, harmonically rich approach to the piano, and with Takashi Mizuhashi on second bass and George Otsuka on drums, the rhythm section cooks without being showy.

The title track has a propulsive, almost hypnotic quality: it builds and builds and then releases in a way that feels genuinely physical. This is a more intense record than Scenery or Cat, less immediately pretty and more demanding, but once it gets its hooks in you it doesn't let go. Three Blind Mice at its most adventurous.

Toki sits at the fuzzy edge between straight jazz and fusion, the same territory that Mahavishnu Orchestra and early Weather Report were exploring around the same time but with a distinctly Japanese emotional temperature. Toki on alto plays with a clean, focused tone and a tendency to hold notes longer than you expect, which creates moments of real suspension.

Kazumi Watanabe's guitar is the perfect foil for Toki's saxophone: where Toki stretches and suspends, Watanabe cuts and darts, and the contrast keeps the texture constantly interesting. Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and Steve Jackson on drums provide a foundation that is tight without being rigid. The whole session was completed in under four hours, nearly everything in one take, and you can hear that directness in the music. This one has a slightly melancholy quality that sets it apart from the more energetic Three Blind Mice releases.

Hiromasa Suzuki's High-Flying catches a moment when Japanese jazz musicians were fully absorbing the electric Miles Davis influence and doing something interesting with it. The album has a keyboard-forward, slightly cosmic quality: electric piano layered with acoustic, horn lines that circle and repeat, grooves that are more funk-adjacent than swing.

It doesn't have the purity of the Three Blind Mice piano trio records but it has energy and atmosphere that those records sometimes lack. Think Headhunters without the American grit, or early Weather Report with a softer edge. Collectors have priced this one accordingly. Hearing it you understand why.

By 1984 Sadao Watanabe had been Japan's most internationally recognized jazz musician for a decade and Rendezvous is his most polished crossover attempt. He recorded it in New York with Marcus Miller, Steve Gadd, and Eric Gale and the production has that mid-eighties sheen that either bothers you or doesn't.

The alto playing is pristine throughout: Watanabe has one of the most consistently beautiful tones in the instrument's history, and he never plays a harsh or unthinking note. This isn't the deepest record he made but it's an example of how good his fundamentals are. Even in a heavily produced contemporary jazz context, the actual saxophone playing is worth your attention.

This live set pays tribute to Charlie Parker and it works because Watanabe doesn't try to sound like Bird: he plays Parker's compositions in his own voice, which is warmer, more lyrical, and less percussive than the original. The club atmosphere is palpable on the recording: you can hear the audience responding to solos, the room has the intimacy of a small jazz venue rather than a concert hall.

The band is tight and sympathetic. "Donna Lee" and "Ko Ko" are the showpieces. What this record demonstrates is how deeply Watanabe absorbed the bebop vocabulary and then filtered it through something distinctly his own. It's a generous, joyful record.

This is fusion at its most polished and crowd-pleasing and there's nothing wrong with that. The GRP All-Stars at this point were a supergroup of contemporary jazz session players, with Sadao Watanabe joining as special guest on alto saxophone. Recorded live at Osaka Festival Hall in March 1980 for an audience that loved this music deeply.

The Japanese jazz audience of the early 1980s was famously enthusiastic and you can feel it in the performance. "Mountain Dance" is the centerpiece: a Grusin original with a keyboard melody that's been on smooth jazz playlists ever since. This isn't adventurous music but it's exceptionally well-played music and the live recording captures an energy that the studio GRP albums sometimes lacked.

Kemo-Sabe is one of those Japanese jazz records that circulates among collectors more than it gets written about, which means most people who own a copy found it through word of mouth or a lucky bin find rather than any kind of press. Nakajima's piano sits somewhere between post-bop and early fusion: harmonically inventive, rhythmically flexible, never quite predictable. Toshiyuki Honda, better known as the leader of the fusion group Burning Waves, plays with more restraint here than on his own records, and the interplay between the two is the session's center of gravity.

The rhythm section is an unlikely pairing: Osamu Kawakami on bass, a fixture of the Tokyo jazz scene who had worked with Sadao Watanabe and Isao Suzuki, and Donald Bailey on drums, the American expatriate best known for his years with Jimmy Smith on Blue Note. Bailey had been living and working in Japan since the late seventies, and his presence gives the quartet a rhythmic directness that grounds Nakajima's more exploratory tendencies. The Yupiteru label was a small domestic imprint and the original pressing was tiny, which explains both the obscurity and the price. What you get is a session that sounds genuinely exploratory rather than calculated. Worth seeking out.