ませひろこ

Mowna is a 2024 album from bassist and composer Hiroyuki Yamaguchi. For this release, Yamaguchi wrote and arranged all nine tracks, which he recorded with a quintet composed of several musicians that played on his previous album Inner Perception (2018) by his Thursday Night Sextet, a band formed through jam sessions at the Tokyo jazz bar and local institution Manhattan. On Mowna, the returning members from Yamaguchi’s sextet are Hiroko Mase on soprano sax, Hinata Ishii on tenor sax, and bassist Yamaguchi, and newly added members for this release are pianist Toshihiko Kohno and drummer Tomoyuki Okabe. ...

“Hard bop jazz aimed towards the universe” might be a good way to introduce soprano saxophonist Hiroko Mase’s debut album First Contact from 2020. Together with her double-sax quintet, the album features ten of her original songs in a vibrant arrangement of energetic hard-swinging and mid-tempo songs brimming with atmospheric layers. The opening song “First Contact” together with #4 “Spinning Petals” (a live version is included in a video below) and #9 “Have Fun”!” prop up the album’s core jazz tentpoles with straight-ahead frameworks reminiscent of the sound of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Cannonball Adderley’s bands: energetic rhythm sections that frame unleashed improvisation from double horn front-lines. ...