Masaki Hayashi on Jazz of Japan | Brian McCrory

Hitomi Aikawa & Masaki Hayashi: Ten To Sen

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ten to Sen is a 2025 release from the duo of percussionist Hitomi Aikawa and pianist Masaki Hayashi. On this album, Aikawa plays marimba, glockenspiel, hand drums, and other percussion instruments, and she composed most on the music as well. Hayashi plays piano on all songs and contributed one composition to the album.

Figure 1: Front cover

The duo’s music is harmoniously beautiful with an understated personality projecting a calm confidence, one that supports a balance of bold strokes and playful trepidation delivered by patient hands. The duo takes its time with gentle moments as well as the elevated dramatic energy of dots and lines swirling together on a canvas to create colorful stories. When not flowing free in rubato intros and sections, the duo locks into implied deep grooves and looped time-based phrases that repeat over one another, sometimes in offsets that create a crisscross of overlapping motifs combining simplicity and complexity all at once. It’s more soothing waves than sharp corners, still the playing is expert and precise.

Hitomi Aikawa: Sweet

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sweet is the title of percussionist Hitomi Aikawa’s debut album. It was recorded and released in Japan in 2018 and contains fourteen of her compositions. A multi-instrumentalist, Aikawa plays various instruments on the songs and is joined on many of them by special guests Masaki Hayashi and Eri Uenoyama on piano, Hiroshi Suzuki on woodwinds, and Megumi Hattori on vibraphone.

As for the instruments Hitomi Aikawa is using on each track, the details are not listed on the CD or in the liner notes. However, clues can be found on her website, where a list of her percussion collection is displayed, and it can be fun to use your ear to try and figure out which instruments are producing the sounds you hear as you listen to Sweet. Her large percussion collection numbers in the dozens and ranges from mallet instruments (vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, glockenspiel), hand drums (djembe, cajón, congas, bongos, timbales), tambourines, castanets, triangle, cymbals, chimes, blocks, Afro-Latin instruments, and many others.

Clepsydra: Un Jour

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Clepsydra’s album Un Jour from 2011 is an eclectic collection of eleven original songs that the quartet often played at live events throughout their musical journey (roughly 2006-2015). Their unusual name may be difficult to read and pronounce initially but is easy to remember when parsed as the three syllables clep-sih-dra. The meaning of the word is an ancient water clock, a device for telling time based on the movement of water through its construction. A charming storybook-style image of a clepsydra appears on the album cover.

Toshihiko Inoue & Masaki Hayashi: Mistral

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mistral is a soulful live jazz album from sax and piano duo Toshihiko Inoue and Masaki Hayashi, recorded in 2008 and released in 2013. Although the extended title Mistral: Duo at Mister Kelly’s may seem to reference the historically famous Mister Kelly’s in Chicago and live albums from Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and others, this Japanese jazz album was recorded at Mister Kelly’s jazz bar in Osaka, an independent venue named in honor of the famous American nightclub.