Tides of Blue is a 2025 release from the collaboration of Japanese jazz musicians Sumire Kuribayashi, Kazuma Fujimoto, and Takashi Sugawa on piano, guitar, and bass, respectively. On this album, the trio plays seven new songs, four composed by Kuribayashi and three by Fujimoto, for a total play time of 51 minutes.
The album brims with brilliant acoustic music full of clear harmonies and patiently developed melodies. The music reflects abstract themes represented by words in the song titles like movement (ways, roads), water (blue, dew, tides), and belonging and comfort (home, let me). The music is not abstract, however, but pinned down with the strength of conviction and personality that each player brings to the music. Each’s player’s identity does not dissolve in the trio but combines to create a new sound that is the sum of the parts. While there is, at first brush, a seemingly slow-moving surface that may describe meditative music as with a yoga playlist or a quiet church setting, there is an undertow of jazz, pop, blues, classical, free, and folk influences throughout. (It’s may be a high bar, but as a sound reference, think of concepts like Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert…). There is depth and nuance in the confident calm, in the ebb and flow. Quietness and patience allow for the trio’s delicate touches to be more noticable and emotionally powerful. It’s not overwhelming, not sparse, but comfortingly present, familiar, pervasive.
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