Kohsuke Mine

Mine's debut as a leader came out on Philips in 1970, the same year Takeshi Fujii founded Three Blind Mice in Tokyo with the explicit intention of documenting Japanese jazz at the highest level. Mine was in on that from the start too: TBM-1 was his own Mine, reviewed below. Taken together these sessions are still among the finest Japanese jazz records of the period: lean, focused, and immediately recognizable as something distinct from the American jazz they drew on.

Mine plays alto saxophone here with a purity of tone that sits somewhere between Lee Konitz and Cannonball: not warm exactly, but not cold either, more like the sound of water in a clear stream. Masabumi Kikuchi's electric piano provides an ideal counterweight, harmonically sophisticated and unpredictable, filling the space Mine opens without crowding it. The American rhythm section of Larry Ridley and Lenny McBrowne gives the session a different gravitational pull than the all-Japanese records that would follow.

Morning Tide is not a companion session but this album’s Japanese title and its opening track, ten and a half minutes that set the reflective rather than abstract tone of the date. McBrowne’s drumming throughout is one of the understated pleasures: responsive, precise, and never ostentatious. For a debut, these records announced a fully formed sensibility rather than a beginning.

TBM-1, the very first album released on Three Blind Mice, is a quintet session that pairs Mine's alto and soprano with Takashi Imai's trombone and Hideo Ichikawa's electric piano. The front line of saxophone and trombone gives the music a fullness that Mine would later strip away, and the effect is of a band playing with collective confidence: each player knows his role and fills it without hesitation.

The record is sometimes categorized as hard bop but that's an oversimplification. The influences are certainly there, but Mine's relationship to the changes has a more exploratory quality than the mainstream American hard bop of the late sixties, and the Japanese rhythm feel, looser in certain specific ways, gives the music a different kind of propulsion. Hiroshi Murakami's drumming is responsive and unhurried, anchoring Ichikawa's harmonic adventurousness.

Mine is worth having as a companion to First rather than an alternative to it: the two approaches, the American rhythm section and the all-Japanese quintet, show different sides of the same musical intelligence, and together they make a strong argument for Mine as one of the most distinctive voices in Japanese jazz from the very start.

By the end of 1970 Mine had established his TBM persona clearly enough that his second TBM album could afford to be more exploratory. The replacement of electric piano with Yoshiaki Masuo's guitar gives the quintet a different textural quality, more open and resonant, which sets off Mine's saxophone playing effectively. Takashi Imai returns on trombone, maintaining the front-line partnership from the debut.

The repertoire here is entirely band originals, one by Mine, two by Yoshio Suzuki and one by Takashi Imai, handled with the characteristic TBM restraint: enough space between notes to hear the room, enough forward momentum to hold the attention. Yoshio Suzuki's bass and Hiroshi Murakami's drums continue to be one of the label's great recurring assets, present without being demonstrative.

Second Album doesn't have the revelatory quality of the debut, but it's a confident step from a musician who clearly knew what he was doing and where he was going. The late-night, introspective mood that would come to define TBM's aesthetic is fully present here.

Daguri, cut for Victor in 1973, is the record where Mine's voice fully crystallizes into what it would remain for the next five decades. Fumio Itabashi's piano is a more adventurous presence than the keyboards on the earlier records, willing to follow Mine into the more oblique harmonic corners his compositions tend toward, and the addition of Hideo Miyata as a second tenor gives the front line an unusual density. The result is a record that sounds both Japanese and universal in the way only the best jazz manages.

The title track is a sustained meditation that builds with extraordinary patience, Mine circling the melody without quite landing on it for several minutes before committing. It's a study in controlled tension, and it stands as one of the finest sustained improvisations he ever committed to tape. Hideaki Mochizuki and Hiroshi Murakami behind him are near-telepathic.

Daguri sits alongside the debut as the essential Kohsuke Mine statement from these early years. If you're coming to this music for the first time and want to understand what made Japanese jazz in this period feel genuinely distinct, this is one of the places to start.

The move to East Wind coincided with Mine's most expansive period, and Out of Chaos is the peak of it. The reunion with Masabumi Kikuchi on piano is the key: the two had worked together on First in 1970, and by 1974 both had matured into more adventurous players. Kikuchi gives Mine someone to push against, and the result is the most urgent record Mine had made to this point.

The album earns its title. The arrangements have a density that the TBM records, with their characteristic spaciousness, generally avoided, and there are moments where Mine's tenor and Kikuchi's piano create something genuinely turbulent before resolving into clarity. Mine sounds exhilarated by the context. Motohiko Hino's drumming is fiery and responsive, the most commanding performance on any Mine record.

Out of Chaos is one of the most collected Japanese jazz records of its decade for good reason. It does something that Japanese jazz of the period often avoided: it takes emotional risks. The playing reaches rather than reflects, and Kikuchi's piano is the catalyst for much of that. This is Mine at his most outward-looking and most exciting.

Solid pulls back from the expansive energy of Out of Chaos and returns to Mine's more characteristically reflective mode, which is not a retreat but a recalibration. Recorded live at Yamaha Hall in Tokyo, this is a quartet date with Mikio Masuda on keyboards, and the title is accurate: this is a record about foundation rather than turbulence, about the satisfaction of well-executed form.

Mine's tenor work here is some of his most technically assured from the period: the long lines are perfectly shaped, the tone consistent across all registers, and the rhythmic placement consistently just slightly behind the beat in the way that gives jazz improvisation its sense of inevitability. Arihide Kurata's drumming is steady and sympathetic, a different energy than Motohiko Hino brought to the previous record. Mine makes difficult things sound unconsidered, which is the highest compliment you can pay a jazz musician.

Solid doesn't have the drama of Out of Chaos, but it's a deeply satisfying record on its own terms. It confirms that the East Wind move wasn't a stylistic departure but an expansion, and that Mine's core voice remained exactly what it had been since the TBM debut.

Sunshower marks a swing back toward soprano saxophone as Mine's primary voice on this date, and the choice suits the material. The compositions here are lighter and more melodic than anything since the TBM years, the harmonic language still sophisticated but the surface more accessible. The expanded instrumentation, with Hiroshi Yasukawa's electric guitar and Mikio Masuda's organ and synthesizer, gives the album a fusion coloring absent from the earlier East Wind records.

Masuda's keyboards take on a more prominent role than on Solid, the interplay between organ textures and soprano saxophone producing something almost atmospheric in quality. The soprano's focused tone against the organ's warmth is one of Mine's most effective combinations. Hideo Miyata’s percussion adds another layer of rhythmic interest, and the four long tracks, each over ten minutes, give the music room to develop.

This is a gentle record in the best sense: music that rewards close listening without demanding it, that opens new details on repeated plays without making you work for them. The East Wind years close here as satisfyingly as they began.