Ryo Noritake

Echo, from 2024, is pianist/composer Hitomi Nishiyama’s latest album and a response to her previous release Dot from 2023. The music on this album was made with the same group and during the same recording sessions and as such, there are many similarities in sound and direction. In aura and conceptually, however, the differences are effectively portrayed by the separate covers and designs: Where Dot shows a monochrome sketch-like grid of hand-drawn dots, Echo places the pianists’ subtly Mona Lisa smile into a vividly abstract gauze of lilac and cobalt swirls and hues. ...

Like pianist Yuka Yanagihara’s previous album Inner Views from 2019, her songs on this year’s release Beloved Ones are also focused on both external vistas and inner reflections. It is as if the inner-outer boundary is balanced, permeable, and transferring the trio’s music and inspiration from in to out and back again, fluidly. From the previous album to this one, the imagery shifts from close (raindrops on a window) to far, with natural scenery in theme for both. A second link to her previous album is found in a track on the Beloved Ones, “Rainy Song #3 In Winter”. This song continues the story started in the opening two tracks on Inner Views, “Rainy Song 1: At Midnight” and “Rainy Song 2: In the Forest”. Comparing the two album covers and the pieces’ progression, the rain has stopped and the eye’s focus has extended further into the world, onto meadows, trees, and mountains. ...

Dot is the 2023 album by pianist/composer Hitomi Nishiyama. Until this week’s release of Echo, Dot was her latest album; Echo is Dot ’s twin, recorded with the same members and during the same sessions. Nishiyama has released many great albums since 2004, and yet it is tempting to call this significant Dot her masterpiece. As a prolific composer with consistent album releases over two decades, many peaks have been reached. Dot forges into some bold new territory, and successfully so. ...

Memory Stones is the 2014 album from guitarist Hiroshi Fukutomi, his second album after his debut Rings of Saturn (2010). On this 57-minute recording of Fukutomi’s original music, the guitarist leads a quartet featuring Koichi Sato on piano and Rhodes, Koji Yasuda on bass, and Ryo Noritake on drums. With Fukutomi’s compositions and his guitar taking center stage, the quartet’s sound is definitely that of a jazz guitar leader’s band. The sound of the jazz guitar is varied, however, and his tone switches between mellow and fluid electric guitar sound to clear and articulate acoustic guitar, coloring the compositions with distinct personalities to suit the song style. Some guitar effects are also used tastefully to add textural layers while preserving the core sound of pure guitar expressiveness. ...

Pianist Yuka Yanagihara’s second piano trio album is Inner Views from 2019, where she plays eight of her original songs in a piano trio format with bassist Yoshiki Yamada and drummer Ryo Noritake. In harmony with the album’s title and cover image, the music is on the whole introspective, focused on the near rather than the far. As Yanagihara puts it herself, these are eight songs that focus on the landscape of one’s mind. ...

Similar in concept to Ray Brown’s Some Of My Best Friends Are… album series in which the legendary bassist plays with assorted partners in jazz, bassist Daiki Yasukagawa’s release Trios II from 2015 features the bassist performing with four different trios assembled from multiple pianists and drummers. A followup to Yasukagawa’s Trios (2010), Trios II brings even more musicians into the recording studio and offers up a new album with the various trios performing 11 songs. ...

Taihei Asakawa’s beautiful Touch of Winter from 2013 is a contemplative jazz album rooted in calm emotion: Memory, melancholy, and rebirth combine to paint stimulating music on a pure white winter tableau. The 10 original songs on this album unfold in the emotion-heavy Brad Mehldau vein of modern piano trio jazz. Patient, somber ballads lie alongside straight-ahead compositions thick with melodic effusions, traces of classical influence, and bluesy suggestions as well. ...

Pianist and composer Koichi Sato’s 2016 release Melancholy of a Journey features a distinctive jazz sextet: a piano trio adding clarinet and guitar for modern groundedness and cello providing graceful maturity. Sato conceived the main theme while traveling in Norway and viewing a certain painting. The work of art, Art Rolfsen’s “The Big Station”, graces the cover and inspired “The Railway Station”, a four-part suite arranged over four tracks. This music emerges and recedes through tracks #1, 6, 9, and 12, resulting in four distinct songs with common echoes. ...