Yuichi Narita

With many jazz bars and performance opportunities reduced during the pandemic period, musicians used novel approaches to create and record music. Musicians would play together over video feeds, host live online events, and send audio files back and forth to one another for collaboration. Some musicians also composed and recorded in conditions resembling self-isolation or even quarantine, resulting in an increase in self-produced music created entirely at home by individual artists. Many of the albums released in recent years share these common bonds like generational traits imprinted on the music. This is another small way by which this period leaves unique reminders of the strangeness of the times characterized by new restrictions, lockdowns, medicines, and masks. ...

Tomoka Miwa, Tokyo-based jazz and pop singer, uses her jazz palette on Colors in Silence, a live recording from 2015. Playing with a piano, bass, and drums combo, she sings jazz standards such as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “My Favorite Things” and the fan-favorite “A House Is Not A Home”. Some spice is added to the set with the classic bolero “Somos Novios”, and the groovy samba-funk “Skindo-le-le”, while the sultry “Love Dance” and the beautiful hymn “Hallelujah” add extra colors to the canvas. ...

Flowers On The Hill is a beautiful album of tender and impeccably delivered music from the vocalist Akiko Suda. The album features lovely original compositions together with jazz, bossa nova, and pop standards performed artistically with creative arrangements. The talented musicians play sensitively and at times sound like a Brad Mehldau-inspired modern jazz piano trio, creating a lush background for Suda’s masterful voice. The album starts strongly with four catchy and elaborate originals penned by Suda and pianist Yuichi Narita, then moves into jazz and pop territory. Novel versions of “Waters of March”, “Doralice”, Chick Corea’s “Crystal Silence”, and the jazz standards “How About You” and “What a Wonderful World” fill out the middle of the tracklist. The album closes sweetly with two pop songs, Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” and Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today”, a pairing perfectly matched with the band’s modern, affectionate mood. ...