Yukari Sekiya: Duets Till Now, From Here

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 Trio with Yuko Tanaka: It’s Ordinary Love And…

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

関谷友加里 on Jazz of Japan | Brian McCrory

Yukari Sekiya: Duets Till Now, From Here

Yukari Sekiya Trio with Yuko Tanaka: It’s Ordinary Love And…