Pianist Yukari Sekiya released Duets Till Now, From Here fourteen years after her 2011 debut recording It’s Ordinary Love And…. This new album offers both a retrospective and a forward view of her music and musical partners through her years of playing. Duets is a two-disc album with 16 songs, and the temporal themes of past and future are reinforced by the label assigned to each disc, with disc one titled “Till Now” and two as “From Here”. ...

Yukari Sekiya (Sekichu) is a jazz pianist, composer, and free improvisationalist who released her first album in 2011 with the group Yukari Sekiya Trio with Yuko Tanaka. The Japanese title of this debut is ありふれた愛なので・・・ translated on the cover as It’s Ordinary Love And… Sekiya’s trio is completed by Michihiro Morisada on contrabass and Tatsuya Hashimoto on drums, and Yuko Tanaka joins as guest vocals and voice. This album is a live recording of seven of Sekiya’s original compositions, performed on one night in December 2010 at the jazz club Big Apple in Kobe. The four musicians all embrace spontaneous, simultaneous creation, and Sekiya’s music is wide open for creativity. Bounding several free jazz sections are the pianist’s composed musical themes and thoughts, written down on the page as clear melodies, structures, accents, and band signals that are coordinated parts of Sekiya’s musical design. At the same time, whole sections of several pieces are set free to allow the musicians to stretch out together. In those sections, the four members improvise freely but together as a group, reaching towards one musical mind, and building to wild crests of sound or subtle unified soundscapes as feelings and the moment dictate. ...

Kakusareta Guwa is a 2025 release from pianist Shikou Ito’s Trio Syncretia. A translation of the Japanese title, 隠された寓話, is also printed on the cover, and reads allegorical stories-shaded. Ito’s trio is a piano-bass-percussion combo, and their music is robust and detailed, soulfully rugged. The sounds from Gen Ogimi’s percussion kit are a change from the regular drum kit that is de rigueur for jazz piano trios, and the sounds of hand drums alongside the snare, toms, and cymbals add a lot of character and color to the music. Intuitively linked to the pulse and beat is bassist Benisuke Sakai, who enhances the rhythms through his firmly connected upright bass with both grounded and adventurous playing. ...

Jazz pianist Fumio Karashima’s 2006 album Great Time scratches the itch for a straight ahead jazz recording, bringing with it the satisfaction of the promised enjoyment conveyed by the title. Joining Karashima are Drew Gress on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, making up a trio of well-known and highly respected musicians in the jazz world. In particular, DeJohnette, who passed away in October 2025, was a worldwide legend whose influence has been immense. Fumio Karashima was also highly visible in the Japanese jazz world, and internationally to a lesser degree (admittedly, few musicians worldwide achieved DeJohnette’s level of fame). Yet, as an undeniable force and a recognized name in the jazz community, Karashima lived a life full of jazz, performing, touring, and recording for spans of years at at time with other jazz giants including American drummers Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, not to mention an abundance of amazing Japanese musicians. ...

A few minutes walk from Nishi-Ogikubo station in Tokyo lies a scruffy stairway that leads down to the entrance to Aketa no Mise jazz bar. Above the stairway lies the Japanese name アケタの店 (Aketa no Mise — more on this later) and the words LIVE, SINCE 1974, and, in small print in a corner, アケタ革 (Aketagawa), and attached to the walls are crinkled flyers, schedules, and faded pictures of jazz events. There are enough clues for first-timers who lack Japanese fluency to know that this must be the jazz bar near Nishi-Ogikubo station that they were told about. Plus, it’s another legendary jazz spot right off of the lengthy Chuo train line, aka the “jazz line”, along with Velvet Sun, Manhattan, Shinjuku Pit Inn, and others. ...

The new album Orbital Resonance from Sumire Kuribayashi, released in September 2025, is the latest creative output from the popular Japanese jazz pianist and composer. This graceful album contains eight original songs performed by the trio of Sumire Kuribayashi on piano, Motohiko Ichino on guitar, and Kyrie Anderson on drums, with guest trumpeter Niran Dasika making it a quartet on three songs. For this release, two prominent jazz players from Australia join Kuribayashi and Ichino, yet Kuribayashi is no stranger to international connections. In addition to her frequent concerts in Japan, she’s performed with many non-Japanese musicians for overseas tours and recording sessions, including this album’s guest trumpeter Niran Dasika, who has recorded several of his past albums with Kuribayashi. ...

Yuri Hirota’s album Magical Moonlight was released in 2017 as a petite jazz gallery of some of her favorite songs and original compositions songs. These are played by pianist Hirota with her group,“Quartet Tsukino no Sampo” (月夜の散歩), which roughly translates to The Walk on a Moonlight Night Quartet. Although this is a slightly older album, Hirota announced recently that this album and her earlier release Flea Circus (2015) were now available on streaming platforms, making this a good time to refresh this short article about the album. ...

Anitya is pianist Harumi Nomoto’s fourth trio record, released in 2025. It’s been a decade-plus since the trio’s previous release Virgo (2014), with their earlier albums released as far back as 2007 and 2002, so it was a thrilling surprise when plans for a new recording were announced at one of their live shows early last year. The anticipation from their loyal fans rose in 2025 as the trio scheduled more concerts before the recording, to fine-tune the new songs and oil the performance gears at live concerts around Tokyo. Following that, Anitya was quickly recorded over two days in June and released in December 2025 right in the midst of a busy holiday season. ...

Guitarist Hiroshi Fukutomi’s first album is Rings of Saturn from 2010. On this recording, the guitarist plays modern jazz compositions under the flag of his own quintet featuring Masahiro Yamamoto on alto and soprano sax, Koichi Sato on piano (also on Fukutomi’s 2014 followup Memory Stones), Hiroshi Ikejiri on bass, and Ryo Shibata on drums. Fukutomi’s debut album runs for 54 minutes and features seven original compositions, six from Fukutomi and one from saxophonist Yamamoto. The songs are composed by Fukutomi to be platforms for interplay, where the front-most instruments of guitar, sax, and piano merge and relay with an intimate immediacy, rather than each musician stepping back to make room for longer periods of singular adlibs. As with great jazz combos, there’s close collaboration where all five members listen closely to one another, pick their moments to step forward or back, and raise or relax the tension with the right-timed notes and rhythms. ...