Ryoji Orihara

Anitya is pianist Harumi Nomoto’s fourth trio record, released in 2025. It’s been a decade-plus since the trio’s previous release Virgo (2014), with their earlier albums released as far back as 2007 and 2002, so it was a thrilling surprise when plans for a new recording were announced at one of their live shows early last year. The anticipation from their loyal fans rose in 2025 as the trio scheduled more concerts before the recording, to fine-tune the new songs and oil the performance gears at live concerts around Tokyo. Following that, Anitya was quickly recorded over two days in June and released in December 2025 right in the midst of a busy holiday season. ...

From 2022, Breathe Beneath the Sun is pianist Mikiko Nagatake’s second release, a jazz piano trio recording that came out just one year after her debut album Into the Forest (2021). With the same members as on her first album, her trio includes Ryoji Orihara on fretless bass and Sota Kira on drums, two popular players in many Tokyo jazz groups. Another similarity between Nagatake’s first two albums is the addition of special guest horn players on a few songs. While the first album featured saxophonist Nami Kano on a bonus track, this album features two more saxophone guests well-known in the world of Japanese jazz, Kosuke Mine and Eiichi Hayashi, who join Nagatake as special guests for one track each near the end of the album. ...

As We Breathe is the 2008 release from the Ryosuke Hashizume Group, a sax-led ensemble of sax, guitar, drums, bass, and piano. This jazz-quintet combination of instruments and players forms the perfect medium for bringing Hashizume’s penned compositions to life. I’ve introduced this group’s other releases at earlier points, although in an out-of-order sequence, so this article completes the set of the group’s six releases to date. As We Breathe, with nine tracks and about 70 minutes, is the second album out of the six released by the group. Despite the earliness of this and their previous album (their debut Wordless), their concept was already well-defined based on Hashizume’s compositions and musical direction, and the musicians show a cohesive personality with intuitively-linked playing and precise timing. ...

NHORHM is New Heritage of Real Heavy Metal. It’s not only a homage to the original NWOBHM abbreviation, but also an incredible initialism of the three musicians: N ishiyama H itomi (piano), O rihaya R yoji (bass), and H ashimoto M anabu (drums), with names in the last-name-first Japanese convention. (I include a brief diversion on “What is NWOBHM?” later, below…) This debut album from NHORHM was released in 2015 and rereleased/remastered in 2024 when the first run was sold out, and both new listeners and fans who originally missed out were clamoring for copies. The album contains ten tracks, nine cover songs and one original by pianist Nishiyama. All arrangements are by Nishiyama, and this is not something to take lightly; the whole project hinges on the idea of a jazz piano trio covering heavy metal tunes, and the success of the endeavor relies a lot on bridging the gap between those distinct sounds, styles, and instrumentation, and on making the music appealing, listenable, and great, despite the obvious novelty aspect that may precede the experience. Yet, never fear, Nishiyama took the challenge seriously and put a lot of work into this project. ...

Saxophonist and composer Ryosuke Hashizume has released six albums with the Ryosuke Hashizume Group over nearly two decades. These albums feature Hashizume’s uniquely original compositions played by his long-running group. This group has mainly been a quintet (of sax, guitar, piano, bass, and drums) with many of the same members present throughout the years. In particular, guitarist Motohiko Ichino and fretless electric bassist Ryoji Orihara have been a constant and large part of the sound of the group. They are brilliant electric partners to Hashizume’s breathy and sawtoothed acoustic sax sound (Hashizume also dips into electricity a bit when playing his sax as cycles and drones looped through a device, occasionally). ...

Virtual Silence (2022) is a 38-minute experience in five chapters, a project born of a moodily lit and ambient concept from bassist Ryoji Orihara and vocalist Chie Nishimura. On their first album, the pair are joined by guests May Inoue on guitar and Tamaya Honda on drums, an addition that marvelously decorates the simple but evocative themes with ethereal dimensions and deep textures. Throughout, Nishimura’s voice is used as a melodic instrument alongside guitar and bass, singing minimalistically on all five tracks with no lyrics or words. ...

Jabuticaba is the self-titled debut record from pianist Mikiko Nagatake and saxophonist Nami Kano, two players active in the modern-day Japanese jazz scene as leaders of their own groups and members of other projects. Here on this 2021 release, these kindred spirits play eight songs, four originals and four reinterpreted cover songs from legends Carla Bley, Lee Konitz, and others. Based in jazz but extending beyond the genre, the music contains a great mix of moods: creatively jaunty, dark and brooding, fanciful, quirky, gentle and sensitive. The personality of the duo surfaces in fun and sensitive ways as the duo moves intuitively through shades of color, mood, and style. ...

The title of the album Acoustic Fluid from the Ryosuke Hashizume Group captures the essence of moving, flowing sounds that fill up this music. Like most of Hashizume’s albums and live shows, his original compositions are featured on this 2012 album, his sixth release. Throughout /Acoustic Fluid/’s nine tracks, the five-member group expands these charts with push-and-pull activity, like waves on water or breaths of air. The music on this album alternates between slow, free sketches and mid-tempo modern jazz. The slower tracks are beautifully patient, somewhat open-ended with room for the group to pulse and grow organically while trekking through the movements. ...

Fever is the 2014 debut release from Trigraph, a band that takes an eclectic approach to their music, focusing on jazz and pop while incorporating various genres and instruments into their music. The core group is the talented trio of musicians Sanae Ishikawa on vocals, Takayoshi Baba on guitar, and Reikan Kobayashi on shakuhachi and other instruments. Two additional musicians fill out the group for this recording, electric fretless bassist Ryoji Orihara, and drummer Yasushi Fukumori. ...

On Yuka Ueda’s 2013 release Dois, the Japanese singer assembles thirteen songs from her Brazilian and Latin repertoire that she’s perfected at live spots and events around Japan. The track listing satisfies with many deep gems and a few common Jobim tunes, a boon for jazz listeners who may be weary of the usual bossa novas. Definitely not background music, this album is active with a strong spirit and spicy energy powered by swaying hip rhythms and oscillations tuned to the bones. ...

Wordless is Ryosuke Hashizume’s first album released in Japan in 2006, kicking off a rewarding series of modern and absorbing albums from this jazz saxophonist’s stellar group. Through his modern music, with a clean recording sound and deep reverb, the style of ECM and similar European jazz music is brought to mind. Hashizume’s group for this album is a quartet built on sax, electric guitar, fretless electric bass, and drums, and creates a sound that is both organic and electric, sleekly modern. Hashizume also uses effects to loop his sax on a few tracks, heightening the otherworldly effect on portions of the album. ...

Bonanza, from 2012, is the debut release from guitarist Yudo Matsuo, whose kinetic quartet performs original songs with influences from electric jazz fusion to pop songwriters, a palette of sounds reflecting his varied artistic sides. The core band is made up of guitar, trumpet, fretless electric bass, and drums, with guest keyboard on three tracks adding a warm bluesy sound for extra soul. While much of the music is built around a fusion jazz/rock mood which runs through the album, the dial also moves to include smooth jazz sounds, evocative jazz waltzes, and pop, including a rendition of “Blackbird” by The Beatles. One track, “Loplop”, comes closest to pure bop guitar with a fast swing beat and walking bass, where Matsuo plays quick jazzy lines in the style of guitarists such as Tal Farlow and Pat Martino. ...

An unlikely fusion of heavy metal and modern jazz strikes all the right chords on NHORHM’s fourth album New Heritage Of Real Heavy Metal -Extra Edition-, released in 2019 in Japan. While jazz musicians have traditionally interpreted popular music and Broadway musicals for inspiration, NHORHM harvests heavy metal for a surprisingly fitting and rich source of material. Pianist Hitomi Nishiyama expertly rearranges heavy metal songs for piano jazz trio arrangements, imbuing the music with her characteristic elegance, darkness, intelligence, and fun. The intricate harmonic lines that Nishiyama excels at playing fit well with the dense heaviness of her carefully curated metal choices, complemented marvelously by the dexterous energy of Ryoji Orihara’s fretless bass and the rhythmically clever dynamics of Manabu Hashimoto. Far from benign cocktail jazz, the resulting music has a smart sharpness inspired by the volume and roughness of the metal spirit. While not distorted or aggressive, it is both light and heavy, and definitely rocks in its own way. ...

Expressing an exuberance for life with an original jazz spirit, Life Is Too Great from the Sayaka Kishi Trio is a vivid recording, full of variety and infused with the pure music spirit of Sayaka Kishi. Active in many groups and collaborations, Kishi returns to the classic piano trio form on Life Is Too Great and leads a powerhouse jazz trio, showcasing talent and songwriting with new original tunes, with the ever-hardy, invigorating Ryoji Orihara on fretless bass and crisp rhythmic master Akira Yamada on drums. ...

Pianist Harumi Nomoto’s 2014 release Virgo is a constellation of grooves, moods, and textures, boldly incorporating inter-genre approaches as piano jazz is woven with Eastern sounds, African rhythms, and hip-hop-influenced beats. Virgo follows the pianist’s previous albums Another Ordinary Day (2002) and Belinda (2007) and completes a trio of records that progressively show an expansion of creative vision and songwriting tact. Through arrangements honed at Japanese jazz clubs through prior years, the music was released to eager fans with this album of seven originals plus an arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s “Green Chimneys”, which gets a unique slow-and-low groove treatment here. ...

Music that takes you places, Visible/Invisible from the Ryosuke Hashizume Group presents six works of art from the saxophonist/composer, perfectly executed by the five musicians, through mellow, warm electric guitar, grooving and smooth electric fretless bass, organic and emotive piano, thrillingly creative drumming, and center-stage visceral tenor sax, filling out the spaces of otherworldly jazz. Through sounds ranging from ethereal and delicate to deep and groovy, the music steadily develops in dramatic style, patiently, with nooks and crannies of musical texture creating a fulfilling, lush experience. This is art music, creative jazz with rock, modern classical, and free elements, carefully crafted with space for the skilled musicians to stretch out together, painting fantastic and vivid colors with harmonic richness and rhythmic dynamicism. ...

Incomplete Voices is the latest release from the Ryosuke Hashizume Group, released in 2017. As with prior albums, this is a wonderful collection of carefully conceived modern jazz compositions showcasing the saxophonist’s concepts and the tight-knit group dynamics. Close attention is paid to the harmonic and rhythmic layers in the music with excitement built on climactic resolutions and striking moods. The music is sleek, organic, and hypnotic at times. For example, track #3 “Synesthesia” is particularly magical as time and pulse slip and shift as the music develops; at other times, the group locks into a detailed groove, or opens up the framework and allows timekeeping to fade from the audio palette. The roomy improvisational passages are filled with emotional passion and rooted by the quintet’s empathy established through years of live and recording experience. ...