Kohsuke Mine

Rendezvous was made for Video Arts Music, a small Tokyo label, and it is the first record on this page to fall outside the big-label run of TBM, Victor, East Wind and Verve. The record has a live-in-the-room quality that the more produced earlier albums sometimes lacked, and the material is played with the directness of a musician who has nothing left to prove.

The programme is mostly standards, and the readings are among Mine’s most melodically direct of this period, the harmonic sophistication still present but in service of songs that reward humming rather than analysis. This is a more accessible record than much of his work, and none the worse for it.

Rendezvous is an underheard late-period Mine record that deserves more attention. It doesn't have the historical significance of the TBM or East Wind recordings, but it shows a musician fully at home in his own voice, which is its own kind of achievement.

A standards album at sixty-four should be either a lazy cash-in or a genuine reckoning, and Plays Standard is emphatically the latter. Mine approaches these familiar tunes as he approaches his own compositions: with care, patience, and a preference for the interior over the exterior. He's not playing these songs to demonstrate command of the tradition; he's playing them because they still interest him.

The choice of material is conservative in the best sense: standards that have accrued meaning through decades of jazz interpretation, chosen because they give Mine the harmonic material he needs to work. The tenor on the ballads has a particular beauty at this stage of his career, the tone quieter and more focused than in his younger years, and the horns of Fukumura and Matsushima keep the up-tempo numbers from settling.

Plays Standard is Mine in late-period form, the voice stripped to its essentials, the technique entirely in service of expression. It's the record you'd play for someone who wanted to understand what Japanese jazz had become in the forty years since the TBM debut.

With Your Soul has a valedictory quality despite having appeared eight years before Mine’s most recent recording. The title suggests the emotional register Mine was working in at sixty-seven: music made from accumulated feeling rather than technical demonstration, the saxophone as direct conduit from interior life to listener.

Some of the improvisations here are as spacious as anything Mine had recorded, the phrasing so patient that entire sections of tracks pass with more silence than sound. This is not withholding; it's a different kind of statement, one that trusts the listener to fill the space with their own attention.

With Your Soul is an acquired taste, more demanding than most of Mine's catalogue in its quietude. But for listeners who have followed his work from the TBM years, there's something deeply satisfying about hearing the same musical intelligence at work in such an interior mode.

A concert film rather than an album, the thirty-sixth instalment of Atoss International’s Live Lab. series, it documents Mine in the setting where his music has always been most natural: a small room, an attentive audience, no overdubs. The playing is slightly more extroverted than the studio records of the same period, the presence of an audience drawing Mine toward longer phrases and more outward expression.

The informal atmosphere of the record is one of its pleasures. Tunings between pieces, brief comments from Mine, the sounds of a live room: these things are often edited out of live jazz releases in the interest of polish, but here they contribute to the sense of a genuine occasion rather than a performance.

Live Lab is primarily for the committed Mine listener rather than a point of entry, but within that audience it's a welcome document of where he was in his late sixties: still developing, still engaged, still worth watching.

Bamboo Grove, recorded when Mine was seventy-four, is one of his finest late-career statements and a reminder that some musicians simply don't decline in the conventional sense. The physical requirements of the saxophone demand maintenance that Mine has clearly kept up, and the musical intelligence behind the playing has, if anything, deepened.

The quartet with Eriko Shimizu, Takashi Sugawa and Kazunori Takemura gives the record a feeling of continuity with the working bands of the 2010s, the four musicians moving together with the ease of long familiarity. The compositions are unhurried and melodically generous, the kind of music that requires no context to be appreciated.

Bamboo Grove is a remarkable document of a fifty-year career still in forward motion. The title is apt: bamboo grows slowly, establishes deep roots, and doesn't reveal the depth of its growth in the daily observation. Mine's career has been like that. This late-period flowering is entirely consistent with what was announced in 1970, and entirely its own achievement.