須川崇志

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. ...

Oxymoron is a live recording from saxophone player Akihiro Yoshimoto and bassist Takashi Sugawa. The duo recorded a live performance in 2016 at the jazz club Apollo in Tokyo, Japan, and released that recording as this album in 2017. Through the album’s eleven tracks and thirty-six minutes, Yoshimoto and Sugawa play free jazz and experimental music that pushes beyond the boundaries of standard jazz. The pair avoids the more easily identifiable trademarks of conventional music and songwriting to chase the free-flowing exchange of spontaneous ideas and sounds with few limits imposed. ...

Moving Color is the second album from saxophonist Akihiro Yoshimoto and his quartet. With eight original songs drawn from his palette, he blends serious musical exploration and improvisation with elements of modernity, jazz tradition, and a bit of humor. Strength in composition and group cohesion is clear: the quartet plays confidently, as if they are disclosing a secret bit by bit, modestly exhibiting their skills yet playing with brimming energy and a locked-together sense of where they are going. ...