Terumasa Hino

Terumasa Hino was twenty-five when he made this debut as a leader, and the confidence is startling. Five tracks, no filler, the quartet locked in from the opening bars of "Soulful." What you hear immediately is the tone: bright, piercing, with a vibrato that sits right on the edge of controlled and uncontrolled. It owes something to Freddie Hubbard, something to Lee Morgan, and something that belongs entirely to Hino.

The title track is the heart of the record. Over a brooding minor vamp, Hino builds a solo that starts in the middle register and works its way up with an almost unbearable patience, each phrase a little more insistent than the last. Yuji Ohno's comping underneath is spare and smart, leaving enormous space for the trumpet to breathe. Ohno would later become one of Japan's most celebrated composers, but here he is simply a superb jazz pianist, attentive and rhythmically exact.

Kunimitsu Inaba and Motohiko Hino (Terumasa's younger brother) form a rhythm section that would anchor nearly every important Japanese jazz date of the late 1960s. Their "Summertime" is taut and dark, stripped of any sentimentality, the Gershwin melody treated as a launching pad rather than a destination. This is a debut that already sounds like the work of a fully formed musician.

This is where two of the most important musicians in Japanese jazz history meet as co-leaders for the first time, and the result is extraordinary. Hino had been working in Hideo Shiraki's quintet since 1965, and Kikuchi was already the most adventurous pianist in Tokyo. The intuitive understanding between them is audible from the first notes of "Long Trip," a drawn-out modal piece that moves like weather: slowly, inevitably, with sudden gusts of intensity.

The feel is very much in the Blue Note mode of the late 1960s. Think of the Hank Mobley and Lee Morgan records from the same period: long tracks, a modal center, the rhythm section pushing the soloists into darker and more adventurous territory with each chorus. Kikuchi's piano is restless and angular, never settling into predictable patterns. Takeru Muraoka's tenor saxophone adds a harder, more aggressive voice to the front line, and his solo on "Tender Passion" is one of the most emotionally direct things on the record.

The Inaba-Hino rhythm section is at its peak here. Motohiko Hino's drumming has a coiled, spring-loaded quality, never rushing but always pushing, and Inaba's bass is a gravitational constant underneath the increasingly free explorations of the soloists. "Ideal Portrait" and "H.G. and Pretty" round out a record that stands as the definitive document of late-1960s Japanese hard bop at its most ambitious.

Everything changed on July 31, 1969. The day before, Miles Davis had released In a Silent Way, and the tremor was already rippling through jazz. Hino walked into Yamaha Hall in Ginza with a quintet that had plugged in: Hiromasa Suzuki on electric piano, Kunimitsu Inaba on electric bass, and the same Muraoka-Hino front line from the Kikuchi session, now pointed at a completely different horizon.

The opening track, "Like Miles," is exactly what the title promises and more. Over a repeating electric piano figure and a bass line that throbs rather than walks, Hino plays with a spaciousness and tonal darkness that is new in his work. The influence is unmistakable, but the result is not imitation. Where Miles was cool and distant on In a Silent Way, Hino is fiery and present, his trumpet cutting through the electric haze with an urgency that feels distinctly his own.

Hiromasa Suzuki's electric piano is the key textural element. He would go on to become one of the most important arrangers in Japanese jazz (his own album Cat is a classic), and his playing here is full of harmonic curiosity: dense, slightly dissonant chords that give the rhythm section a weight the acoustic lineup never had. Muraoka's tenor is looser and more abstract than on the Kikuchi date, responding to the new electric context with longer, more searching phrases. This is the record where Hino stopped being a brilliant interpreter of the American idiom and became something more: a voice with its own gravitational pull.

Into the Heaven marked the beginning of a prolific stretch that would see Hino recording several albums a year. The quintet retains Muraoka and the Inaba/Motohiko rhythm section from the earlier dates but replaces Kikuchi with Hiromasa Suzuki at the piano, and the change shifts the group's center of gravity. Suzuki's touch is lighter, more lyrical, and his comping gives the horn players more room to stretch. Where the earlier sessions had the density of hard bop, this is something more open: the compositions breathe, the solos unfold at their own pace, and the rhythm section plays with a looseness that suggests long hours of live performance together.

Muraoka's tenor is darker and more aggressive than on the Columbia dates, and his interplay with Hino has taken on the quality of a real conversation, the two voices pushing and pulling each other through the changes. Motohiko Hino's drumming has grown more complex, full of polyrhythmic accents that owe as much to Tony Williams as to Elvin Jones.

The title track builds from a gentle piano introduction to a full-ensemble climax that rivals anything on the earlier records. This is a quintet playing at the peak of its collective ability, and the recording captures it with an immediacy that studio polish might have blunted.

Journey to Air is Hino's first New York recording, cut at Upsurge Studio in March 1970 with a group of young American musicians who would go on to extraordinary careers. Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman, both barely in their twenties, bring a raw intensity to the front line that pushes the music into territory none of the Tokyo sessions had approached. Olu Dara's second trumpet adds a further layer of harmonic density to the ensemble passages.

The energy of this date is completely different from the Takt/Columbia records. Mike Garson's piano is angular and dissonant, owing more to Cecil Taylor than to any hard bop tradition, and the twin-drum approach with Bobby Moses and Motohiko Hino creates a polyrhythmic undertow that never lets the music settle into comfortable grooves.

The longer pieces push toward free territory with a conviction that the earlier records only hinted at. Hino's playing rises to the challenge of this fiercer company, his phrases growing longer and more adventurous, his tone hardening into something steely and urgent. This is the sound of a musician discovering what he is capable of when surrounded by players who refuse to let him coast.

The second of Hino's 1970 New York recordings, Alone Together places him alongside Steve Grossman and two of the city's finest rhythm section players: Harold Mabern and Richard Davis. The quintet format allows for a different kind of interplay than the large ensemble of Journey to Air. Grossman's alto and soprano work is taut and searing, his post-Coltrane vocabulary filtered through a sensibility already moving toward fusion, and his exchanges with Hino have the crackling tension of two strong personalities finding common ground in real time.

Mabern's piano is the session's ballast: deep-rooted, blues-saturated, anchoring the more abstract passages with a harmonic sureness that keeps the music from floating away. Richard Davis on both acoustic and electric bass provides a foundation that is at once flexible and immovable. His arco work on the slower pieces adds a classical gravity to the sound.

Motohiko Hino's drumming has adapted to the American context with striking speed: his playing here is looser and more responsive than on the Tokyo dates, shaped by the free-time sensibility of the post-Coltrane rhythm section tradition. The title track builds from a gentle opening to a full-ensemble climax that is among the most powerful moments in Hino's early discography.

The Berliner Jazztage invitation was a landmark moment for Hino and for Japanese jazz generally. European festival audiences in the early 1970s were hungry for new voices, and Hino delivered with a performance of ferocious intensity. The live recording captures a band playing at full stretch before an audience that clearly did not know what to expect and was won over completely.

The energy level is extraordinary from the opening bars. Hino's trumpet burns with a brightness and aggression that the studio records only hint at, his phrases tumbling over each other in long, breathless cascades. Motohiko Hino drives the rhythm with an insistence that borders on recklessness, his cymbal work a constant shimmer beneath the horns.

The extended improvisations push toward free territory without abandoning structure entirely, and the crowd response is audible and enthusiastic. This was the performance that opened European doors for Hino, leading to the Enja recordings and the international reputation that would follow. As a document of a musician meeting a crucial moment, it is irreplaceable.

Hino Story is a compilation drawn from Hino's Columbia and Canyon recordings, assembled to document his rapid development from the debut quartet through the electric experiments of 1969 and the exploratory Canyon sessions. As a survey of his first five years as a leader, it serves its purpose: the track selection moves chronologically and the arc of growth is unmistakable.

Hearing the early acoustic work alongside the plugged-in Hi-nology material and the free-leaning Canyon tracks in a single sitting makes the speed of Hino's evolution vivid. In 1967 he was a talented hard bop trumpeter; by 1970 he was playing music that had no easy category. The compilation format necessarily sacrifices the album-length coherence of the individual records, but as an introduction to the range of his early work, it is useful.

For collectors who already own the source albums, this is inessential. For newcomers, it offers a compressed overview of why Hino mattered so much to the Japanese jazz scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sound quality is consistent, and the sequencing does justice to the chronological narrative.

Peace and Love is where Hino's American connections start reshaping the music. Reggie Workman, who had anchored Coltrane's quartet during the Africa/Brass sessions, brings a depth and spiritual weight to the bass lines that grounds the whole ensemble. Hideo Ichikawa's piano moves between modal vamps and free clusters, while Kiyoshi Sugimoto's guitar adds textural color that keeps the music from settling into any single groove for too long.

Hino's trumpet tone here is among the most beautiful he committed to tape in this period. The upper-register fire is still there, but the middle and lower registers have a warmth and fullness that suggest a player learning to let the instrument sing. Teruo Nakamura's percussion and Motohiko's drumming together create a rhythmic bed that is more polyrhythmic than anything on the earlier records, the influence of American free jazz audible in every bar.

The extended pieces have a meditative quality that rewards patience. This is not background music; it asks you to sit with it, to breathe with it, to follow its circling lines wherever they lead. The sextet format gives Hino more room than the quintet records, and he uses it well.

Billed as "Terumasa Hino Meets Reggie Workman," A Part deepens the collaboration begun on Peace and Love a month earlier. Workman's bass is the anchor again, and the addition of Takao Uematsu on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet gives the ensemble a darker timbral palette. Hideo Ichikawa moves between acoustic and electric piano, while Yuji Imamura's congas add a persistent rhythmic undertow.

The three sessions across November and December 1970 capture a band in transition. Kiyoshi Sugimoto's guitar floats between comping and textural abstraction, and Uematsu's bass clarinet work on the slower pieces gives the music a gravity the earlier quintet dates didn't have. Hino's trumpet is assertive but measured, choosing his spots carefully within the expanded ensemble.

The record sits slightly below the best of this period; the compositional material is less memorable than Peace and Love, and the longer pieces occasionally meander. But the interplay between Hino and Workman is consistently compelling, and the septet textures reward repeated listening.

Recorded in Germany with a pianoless quartet, Vibrations pairs Hino with German tenor saxophonist Heinz Sauer, a player rooted in the European free jazz tradition. The absence of a chordal instrument is the defining choice: with no piano to fill in the harmony, every note from both horn players carries more weight, and the interplay between trumpet and tenor becomes the architecture of the music itself.

Peter Warren's bass and Pierre Favre's drums form a rhythm section attuned to the European free music aesthetic, responsive and conversational rather than laying down a groove. Favre, one of the most important European free jazz drummers, brings a timbral sensitivity that is utterly different from what Motohiko Hino provided on the Japanese sessions. The result is a record that sounds like nothing else in Hino's catalog.

Sauer's tenor is grainier and more angular than any of Hino's Japanese front-line partners, and the contrast with Hino's burnished trumpet creates something neither musician could have produced in more familiar company. The cross-cultural chemistry is the story here, and when it clicks, the music reaches a raw intensity that the more polished Tokyo sessions rarely attempted.

Love Nature is the most American-sounding record Hino had made to this point, and the personnel explain why. Gary Bartz, fresh from Miles Davis's electric bands, brings an alto saxophone voice steeped in the post-Coltrane aesthetic: cutting, intense, and utterly committed. Reggie Workman returns on bass, and Eric Gravatt, another Miles Davis alumnus, replaces Motohiko Hino on drums. Recorded in Teaneck, New Jersey, this is a quintet of entirely different character from the Tokyo sessions.

The absence of Motohiko is the most striking change. Gravatt's drumming is heavier, more aggressive, rooted in the rhythmic language of On the Corner and Live-Evil. Kiyoshi Sugimoto's guitar is the only carryover from the Japanese sessions, and his playing adapts to the new context, becoming more angular and electric in its phrasing. The ecological theme suggested by the title gives the compositions a spacious, searching quality, but the improvisations are fierce.

Bartz and Hino make a formidable front line, their tones contrasting sharply: Bartz's alto sharp and insistent, Hino's trumpet warm but equally forceful. The rhythm section of Workman, Gravatt, and Sugimoto gives them a foundation that can shift from open modal space to dense polyrhythmic drive within a single bar. This is one of the essential Hino records.