Ryo Fukui

Ryo Fukui was twenty-eight when he made Scenery, a self-taught pianist from Hokkaido who had discovered jazz records in his mid-twenties and become consumed by them. The record was pressed in small quantities in Sapporo and sold for almost nothing. Now it changes hands for hundreds of dollars, and every penny is deserved. It is one of the most fully realized piano trio debuts in jazz history, from anywhere.

What makes Scenery remarkable is that it sounds like someone who has been listening with complete and concentrated attention. The Bill Evans influence is obvious in the voicings and the overall atmospheric quality, but Fukui isn't imitating Evans: he's absorbed him the way you absorb a language until you think in it. The touch is entirely his own, the compositions original, and the relationship between the piano and the rhythm section more mature than a debut has any right to be.

The original 'Scenery' is the centrepiece: a rolling, meditative piece that refuses to resolve the way you expect it to, building and subsiding and returning without ever quite arriving at rest. It has a quality of sustained reverie that is both Japanese in its patience and universal in its effect. Scenery was rediscovered by vinyl collectors in the 2000s and 2010s and its reputation has only grown since. It deserves every word that's been written about it.

Mellow Dream came out on Trio Records, the Japanese label that had an excellent ear for exactly the kind of introspective, post-bop piano jazz Fukui was making, and it sounds like the label's involvement gave him confidence. The record is slightly more open in texture than Scenery, the trio playing looser and more conversational, and it's very nearly as good.

The standard repertoire here is treated with the same seriousness that Fukui brought to his originals on the debut. 'You Don't Know What Love Is' is a slow ballad performance that ranks among the finest things he recorded: the melody stretched and reshaped until it barely resembles its starting point, held together by the logic of Fukui's harmonic imagination and the sensitivity of the rhythm section behind him.

Mellow Dream has been overshadowed by Scenery in the collector market, but the two records belong together as a pair, each illuminating the other. Where Scenery is more concentrated and introspective, Mellow Dream is more generous, more spacious, more willing to let a moment develop in real time. Together they are the complete early statement of one of jazz's most distinctive piano voices.

Seventeen years passed between Mellow Dream and My Favorite Tune, and whatever Fukui was doing during them, he wasn't slowing down. The return is a solo piano date, the stripped-down format well suited to his introspective style, and the playing shows a musician whose touch has deepened while his technical command has remained complete.

The material is all standards, handled with the characteristic patience that makes Fukui's playing so recognizable. He doesn't hurry a ballad. He doesn't demonstrate technique for its own sake. He plays the tune the way someone reads a favorite poem: knowing it well enough to find things in it that weren't there before.

My Favorite Tune is the quiet return of one of the most distinctive piano voices in jazz, and it was heard by relatively few people at the time. That would change in subsequent years as the Scenery reissue cycle brought attention to everything Fukui had done. On its own terms, it's a beautiful record.

Ryo Fukui in New York is the record that answers the question: how does this music hold up when the Japanese context is removed? The answer is completely. Recorded in New York with American rhythm section players Lisle Atkinson on bass and Leroy Williams on drums, the record shows Fukui's piano voice as fully and obviously part of the jazz mainstream, not a Japanese interpretation of it but a genuine contribution to it.

Atkinson in particular is an ideal partner: a bassist with the harmonic sophistication to follow wherever Fukui's left hand leads, and the rhythmic authority to keep the music grounded when the pianist's right hand ventures into more abstract territory. Williams's drumming has an easy, conversational quality that draws the best from Fukui. The interplay between the three is the best on any Fukui record.

Ryo Fukui in New York is perhaps the most accessible entry point to his work precisely because the familiar American jazz context makes it easier to locate what's distinctive about him: the touch, the patience, the quality of time. Everything that made Scenery special is present here, and the different context makes it easier to hear.

A Letter From Slowboat is Fukui's final studio album, recorded at the Slowboat jazz club in Sapporo where he had been the resident pianist for many years. The trio with Awaya and Takemura, and the result is one of his most natural and warm recordings: the home venue, the familiar partners, and a musician at sixty-seven who sounds entirely at peace with his own voice.

The playing throughout is unhurried, the material a mix of standards and Fukui originals treated with equal care. The piano sound captured in the intimate club setting is one of the most beautiful on any Fukui record, and the trio dynamics have the ease of musicians who have been playing together for decades.

Fukui died on March 26, 2016, less than a year after A Letter From Slowboat was released. The title has retrospective weight it couldn't have carried at the time of recording: a letter from a place of belonging, sent by someone who understood exactly where he was and what he had made. It's a perfect final statement.

Live at Vidro '77 was released five years after Fukui's death and documents the original trio in a Japanese club setting in 1977, the same year as Mellow Dream. The recording quality is imperfect in the way that seventies club recordings often are, but the music is strong enough to transcend the limitations of the document.

Heard alongside Mellow Dream, the two records illuminate each other: the studio record more polished and controlled, the live set more spontaneous and occasionally more adventurous. Fukui in front of an audience pushed slightly harder than the microphone suggested he had to, and the rhythm section responded in kind.

Live at Vidro '77 is an important document rather than an essential record: it fills in the picture of the original trio in ways that only live recordings can. For listeners who know Scenery and Mellow Dream well, it's a genuinely exciting find.

The second posthumous Fukui release documents the pianist in his home venue in 2004, nine years after My Favorite Tune and a decade before A Letter From Slowboat. It bridges a gap in the documented record and shows Fukui in the period between his rediscovery and his late-career flowering: comfortable, accomplished, and clearly the resident master of the room he's playing in.

The performances here have the relaxed authority of a musician who has been playing the same venue for years and knows that the audience is with him. The trio interplay is excellent throughout, and Fukui's piano sound in the intimate Slowboat acoustic is as warm and present as anything in the studio recordings.

Ryo Fukui Trio at the Slowboat 2004 is the kind of posthumous release that adds to rather than exploits its subject: another vantage point on a musician whose recorded work was always too small for the quality of the playing it documented. The more of it we have, the better.