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Yonathan Avishai: The Pianist Named Avishai Who Isn't Avishai Cohen
▲ 3 r/IsraelJazz

Yonathan Avishai: The Pianist Named Avishai Who Isn't Avishai Cohen

Yonathan Avishai performing with his trio at the BIM Huis, Amsterdam. (Photo: Dirk Neven, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-yonathan-avishai/

r/IsraelJazz

Yonathan Avishai: The Pianist Named Avishai Who Isn't Avishai Cohen

Yonathan Avishai, a French-Israeli jazz pianist and composer, has spent the better part of 22 years sitting at the piano next to a trumpet player named Avishai. Not the same Avishai: Avishai Cohen, the trumpeter, carries it as a first name. Yonathan Avishai carries it as a surname, plays piano instead of horn, and has appeared on four ECM records led or co-led by Cohen since 2017, in addition to his own.

Before the piano confusion, there's a birthplace and a mentor scene to place him in. Avishai was born in Tel Aviv in 1977, took classical piano lessons as a kid, and found jazz by his teens, gigging in Tel Aviv clubs from around age 14. His earliest surviving studio credit dates to 1999: a release called "Oleartchik Jazz," led by veteran Israeli bassist and singer Alon Oleartchik, that also happened to feature two other musicians who'd go on to get their own spotlights here, saxophonist Eli Degibri and trumpeter Avishai Cohen. Avishai was 22 years old.

The band that actually put him on the international map formed three years later, after a chance 2002 meeting in Barcelona. Third World Love: Cohen on trumpet, Avishai on piano, Omer Avital on bass, Daniel Freedman on drums. Their debut, "Third World Love Songs," was recorded that July, and the quartet kept going for the better part of a decade, four more albums through 2011's "Songs and Portraits." It's the kind of band that, in hindsight, reads like a farm system: three of its four members now have their own posts on this list.

Avishai left Israel for France in 2001, on an exchange program to Alsace. He didn't take the conservatory route from there. He settled near Bordeaux and studied musicotherapy at the city's Atelier de Musicothérapie, teaching and performing on the side while he built a career the slow way, gig by gig, mostly outside the U.S. jazz-school pipeline.

That patience paid off in stages. His debut as a leader, "The Lost Boys," came out in 2010. Five years later, in July 2015, he cut his first trio record, "Modern Times," with bassist Yoni Zelnik and drummer Donald Kontomanou, in a studio in Boisné-la-Tude, a village in rural France most listeners couldn't find on a map. No big-city studio, no fanfare, just two days of recording that became a 16-track album mixing his own compositions with standards like "I've Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)."

Four years after that, Manfred Eicher's ECM Records came calling. Avishai recorded "Joys and Solitudes," his ECM leader debut, at Lugano's Auditorium Stelio Molo RSI in February 2018; it was released in 2019 with Eicher himself producing. Between 2017 and 2024, Avishai appears on five separate ECM releases: Cohen's own ECM leader debut, "Cross My Palm With Silver" (2017); his own "Joys and Solitudes" (2019); the intimate duo record "Playing the Room" (2019); the quartet album "Naked Truth" (2022), alongside bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz; and "Ashes to Gold" (2024), released on the same lineup. That's five ECM credits carrying the same two names, Cohen and Avishai, back to back over seven years, without either of their surnames matching what you'd expect.

He hasn't stopped writing for himself in between. "Retrouvailles" came out in 2023, and "Shapes & Sounds," his latest trio date with Zelnik and Kontomanou, followed on the Jazz&People label in October 2024. Twenty-two years after that first Barcelona meeting, the working quartet with Cohen, Mori, and Ravitz is still touring behind "Ashes to Gold," the two Avishais still splitting the same first and last name between them, still sounding like it was never a coincidence.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 1 day ago
▲ 31 r/japanesejazz

Yosuke Yamashita Once Played a Piano While It Burned. He's Still Playing at 84.

[Image: Yosuke Yamashita, Tokyo, 2001. (Photo: Manel Armengol, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-yosuke-yamashita/

r/JapaneseJazz

Before he was known for anything else, Yosuke Yamashita was one of three young musicians who showed up almost every night at a Tokyo jazz club called Ginparis to argue about the music and play whatever they could. The other two were Terumasa Hino and Masabumi Kikuchi. Hino's own catalog is worth digging into separately; this one's about the third leg of that triangle, the player who pushed furthest out.

Yamashita was born in Tokyo on February 26, 1942. He started on violin at nine, switched to piano as a teenager, and was working professionally by 17. He studied classical composition at Kunitachi College of Music from 1962 to 1967, the same years he was cutting his teeth at Ginparis. His first recording came out in 1963.

In 1969 he formed the Yosuke Yamashita Trio, and by 1974 the lineup, with Akira Sakata on alto sax and Takeo Moriyama on drums, was touring Europe. The live album that came out of that period, "Chiasma," recorded at the Heidelberger Jazztage in Germany, is as good a way as any to hear what made European audiences sit up: three players who sound like they're daring each other to stop first. The trio held together until 1983.

What made him famous outside jazz circles entirely happened in 1973, when graphic designer and filmmaker Kiyoshi Awazu asked him to sit down at a piano and play it while it burned, for a short film. Yamashita later said he felt less like a musician in that moment and more like an object inside someone else's artwork, a strange, honest way to describe playing an instrument that's actively disappearing under your hands. The performance stuck. In 2008, thirty five years later, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa had him do it again, on a beach in Ishikawa.

By the 1980s Yamashita had a new trio in New York, with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Pheeroan akLaff, often joined by Joe Lovano on saxophone. In 1994 that lineage led to a spot at Verve Records' 50th anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall. In 2003 the Japanese government gave him the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon for his contribution to the arts, and in 2010 he went back to teach at Kunitachi, the school where he'd trained decades earlier.

Yamashita never really slowed down. He's 84 now and still performing, most recently with a newer trio he calls Lotus Position, alongside drummer Him Horikoshi and shakuhachi player Akihito Obama. Sixty-three years after his first recording, he's still the same player who once treated a burning piano as a serious gig.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 2 days ago
▲ 2 r/IsraelJazz

Avi Bortnick Auditioned for John Scofield Thinking It Was Just a Free Trip. He Stayed 4 Years.

Avi Bortnick (right) performing with John Scofield's band at Kongsberg Jazzfestival, Norway. (Photo: Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-avi-bortnick/

r/IsraelJazz

Avi Bortnick Auditioned for John Scofield Thinking It Was Just a Free Trip. He Stayed 4 Years.

In January 2000, Avi Bortnick, a guitarist, flew to New York to audition for John Scofield, one of the most respected jazz guitarists alive. He didn't expect to get the gig. "I thought I was just getting a free trip," he said later. At the time he was working as an acoustical consultant, a day job he'd trained for and would eventually return to. The tour he was hired for was booked for five months. It ran four and a half years.

Bortnick was born in Petah Tikva, Israel. His family moved to the United States while he was young, and he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, on a diet of late-1970s funk, soul, and rock, the kind of music that shapes how you play rhythm guitar long before you ever hear a jazz standard. He took lessons from a local guitarist named Peter Mayer and studied classical piano on the side. In 1983 he moved to California and worked through African and Caribbean bands, then landed as a graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he started a group called What It Is. It built a solid following on the Southeast touring circuit. It never got a record deal.

That background is exactly why Scofield picked him. Scofield wasn't building a straight-ahead band and didn't need another bebop guitarist stacking chord voicings. He needed someone who could lock into an R&B groove the way a great drummer locks into a pocket, what Bortnick has described as "a trance-like locking into a groove." Funk and soul from a St. Louis childhood turned out to be the exact resume Scofield was looking for.

Bortnick played on all three records in Scofield's "Überjam" trilogy: Überjam (2002), Up All Night (2003), and Überjam Deux (2013), an arc that stretched across eleven years. His role widened along the way. Überjam was recorded live at Avatar Studios in New York in the summer of 2001, and once drummer Ben Perowsky's sampling duties shifted onto him, Bortnick became the one running loops and samples live, alongside playing guitar. For the title track, he built the sound bed around a Tibetan monk's throat singing in B-flat, caught on the built-in mic of his sampler during an earlier tour through Italy. A jazz record on Verve, one of the genre's most storied labels, with a monastery buried inside it.

He didn't stop at sideman work. In 2003 he released his own debut, Clean Slate. He went on to record three albums with the vocalist Jihae: Elvis Is Still Alive (2008), Fire Burning Rain (2010), and Illusion of You (2015), and worked with Ghost Train Orchestra and others through the following years. All the while, he kept the acoustics career running in parallel. He's now an adjunct professor of architectural acoustics at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design, decades into a parallel career consulting on how rooms and venues actually sound. Guitarist and acoustician, at the same time, for decades. Not many people on this sub can say that.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 2 days ago
▲ 155 r/Jazz

Donald Byrd Made Blue Note's Best-Selling Record. Critics Called It a Sellout.

Donald Byrd, publicity photo distributed by Blue Note Records, 1975. (Photo: Blue Note Records, public domain in the US, published without a copyright notice between 1931 and 1977, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/CrossoverJazz

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/co-donald-byrd/

Donald Byrd Made Blue Note's Best-Selling Record. Critics Called It a Sellout.

Byrd's "Black Byrd" moved more than 100,000 copies in its first six weeks in 1973, becoming Blue Note's best-selling album at that point in the label's history. It reached No. 36 on the Billboard 200, and its title track climbed to No. 19 on the R&B chart and No. 88 on the pop chart. Jazz critics were not impressed. They called Byrd a sellout for handing the arrangements to producers Larry and Fonce Mizell and leaning into funk, soul, and R&B grooves instead of hard bop's harder edges. Listeners didn't share the hesitation. The record connected immediately, not as a slow-burn cult favorite but as an instant hit...

For much more on Mr. Byrd including links to cuts either click through to r/CrossoverJazz

or head over to https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/co-donald-byrd/

u/stnr_on_failure — 4 days ago
▲ 1 r/IsraelJazz

Or Bareket Won a Bass Competition in 2011. He's Been Proving It Ever Since.

Or Bareket performing with his quartet at BIMHUIS, Amsterdam. (Photo: Dirk Neven, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-or-bareket/

Or Bareket Won a Bass Competition in 2011. He's Been Proving It Ever Since.

Or Bareket, a double bassist and composer, took 1st Prize at the International Society of Bassists' jazz competition in 2011, the same year he moved to Brooklyn to build a career on the New York jazz scene. Fifteen years later, he's released four albums as a leader and become one of the most in-demand low end players in the city.

Bareket's own story reads like his music sounds: pulled from more than one place at once. Born in Jerusalem to a family with Moroccan, Iraqi, Argentinian, and Eastern European roots, he grew up splitting time between Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv before landing in Brooklyn. He picked up electric bass at 16 after hearing Jaco Pastorius, switched to upright at 18, and trained classically with Teddy Kling, principal bassist of the Israel Philharmonic, and later Professor Michael Klinghoffer. Alongside that classical grounding, he studied jazz in Israel with none other than Avishai Cohen, the bassist who was the very first artist ever profiled in this series. It's a small, satisfying loop: the mentor got the first write-up, and now the student gets his.

His debut, OB1, came out on Fresh Sound Records in 2017 with a band that reads like a highlight reel of Israeli jazz talent: Gadi Lehavi on piano and Ziv Ravitz on drums, alongside guitarist Shahar Elnatan. Two years later came 33 (Enja Records, 2019), where Nitai Hershkovits took the piano chair and vocalist Camila Meza guested on two tracks, including a hushed duo reading of "Carmo Capricho" with just her voice and his bass. Follow the personnel credits across Bareket's catalog and you're basically re-reading this series' own back pages.

2022 brought Sahar, written and recorded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The title does double duty in Semitic languages: "crescent" in modern Hebrew, and "just before dawn" or "insomnia" in Arabic dialects, which tracks for an album made during a year when nobody was sleeping well. His most recent record, Yōm (Enja Records, 2024), was produced by vibraphonist Joel Ross and recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut, over two days in September 2024. It's the sound of his current quartet (Godwin Louis on saxophones, Jeremy Corren on piano, Savannah Harris on drums) at its most confident, and it sent the band on its most extensive European tour yet.

Along the way, Bareket has shared stages and studios with Chris Potter, Joshua Redman, Ari Hoenig, Billy Hart, Gilad Hekselman, Yotam Silberstein, and Cyrille Aimee, among others. That range, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and straight-ahead jazz vocabulary, all filtered through one bass, is the throughline across everything he's made.

Where to start listening:

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-or-bareket/

u/stnr_on_failure — 4 days ago
▲ 3 r/IsraelJazz

Gadi Lehavi: The Teenager Ravi Coltrane Discovered Is Now Teaching at The New School

Gadi Lehavi performing at the INNtöne Jazz Festival, Austria, May 2016. (Photo: Schorle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-gadi-lehavi/

r/IsraelJazz

Gadi Lehavi: The Teenager Ravi Coltrane Discovered Is Now Teaching at The New School

Gadi Lehavi, a jazz pianist born in Tel Aviv on April 29, 1996, started at the keyboard at six months old :-) and moved into serious classical study by age nine. He was still a teenager when saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, son of John Coltrane, heard him play and invited him onto the stages of the Village Vanguard and Birdland, two of New York's most storied jazz rooms. Most players wait a full career for a Vanguard booking. Lehavi got his before he could legally rent a car.

He made his recording debut at 17, appearing on saxophonist Eli Degibri's 2013 album "Twelve." That's not a footnote. Getting called for a session at that age means someone senior in the scene already trusted his time and his ears.

Where Lehavi has spent most of his working life since, though, is inside one trio. GTO Trio, with bassist Tal Mashiach and drummer Ofri Nehemya, has now been together well over a decade, long enough that the chemistry stopped being a selling point and became the whole sound. Their debut, "From the Road," came out in 2018. Then in January 2025, GTO Trio signed with Anzic Records, the New York label Anat Cohen co-founded in 2005, and released "Within," nine tracks the trio wrote and produced themselves. Landing on a label with that pedigree, over a decade into playing together, is the kind of marker that's easy to miss if you're not paying attention and impossible to fake if you are.

Lehavi's side credits read like a syllabus: pianist duties alongside Chick Corea, Dave Liebman, Bobby McFerrin, Melissa Aldana, Ari Hoenig, and Eddie Gomez, plus stage time with fellow Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman. He also turns up on Newvelle Records' "Newvelle Muri" box set leading his own trio session, "Wishes," a five-track feature with bassist Romeu Tristão and drummer Daniel Dor.

And he's not only playing. Lehavi now teaches at The New School in New York, the same kind of conservatory track that shaped his own early years, and works on the side as a filmmaker and film composer. He played SFJazz's Summer Sessions in 2024, so this isn't a name you're catching on the way down. He's still very much on his way up, just from a higher floor than most players ever reach.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 5 days ago
▲ 16 r/japanesejazz

Kohsuke Mine - One Saxophonist, Three Labels, the Whole Reissue Timeline

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-kohsuke-mine/

r/JapaneseJazz

Kohsuke Mine turned pro at eighteen, walking out of his high school's clarinet program in 1962 to join a band called Blue Seven. He's been playing saxophone professionally ever since, and his catalog happens to trace almost the entire arc of Japanese Jazz.

He debuted as a leader in 1970 with two records at once: "First" on Philips, and "Mine" on a brand new label called Three Blind Mice, where his LP became TBM's very first catalog release. "First" is worth a second look for how it was made. It was cut in New York with pianist Masabumi Kikuchi on electric piano, bassist Larry Ridley, and drummer Lenny McBrowne, three years before Mine himself moved there. His American sound arrived on record before he did!

By the mid-1970s he'd shifted into modal fusion for East Wind, one of the small Japanese labels now central to the reissue revival. "Out of Chaos" came out in 1974, followed by "Solid" and "Sunshower" in 1976, both leaning harder into the electric, groove-driven sound that later became his signature.

Then he went further. In 1979 Mine co-founded Native Son, a jazz-funk supergroup built around pianist Takehiro Honda's Fender Rhodes and Mine's own saxophone leads, with guitarist Motonobu Ohde, bassist Tamio Kawabata, drummer Hiroshi Murakami, and percussionist Thomas Colon rounding out the band. This wasn't a side project. Native Son released eleven albums on JVC and Polydor between 1979 and 1987, starting with "Savanna Hotline" and the self-titled "Native Son," both out that first year.

TBM in 1970, East Wind in the mid-70s, Native Son through the 80s: three of the labels and sounds this scene cares about most, one saxophonist connecting all of them. And he never stopped. His discography runs clean through to 2019's "Bamboo Grove" and 2022's "Five Dance," recorded well into his seventies.

Along the way he played with Joe Henderson, Mal Waldron, Gil Evans, Sadao Watanabe, and Terumasa Hino.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 6 days ago
▲ 194 r/Jazz

Roy Ayers - Got His First Vibraphone Mallets From Lionel Hampton. He Was Five.

Roy Ayers, 2019; Av Edwardx. Lisens: CC BY SA 4.0

Roy Ayers Got His First Vibraphone Mallets From Lionel Hampton. He Was Five.

Lionel Hampton was already jazz's first great vibraphone star when he handed a five-year-old Roy Ayers his first pair of mallets in Los Angeles. Ayers, born September 10, 1940, grew up in a musical household in the city's South Park section, and that early gift turned out to be a straight line. He kept playing, kept studying, and by 1962 was working as a bebop sideman around LA. His debut album, West Coast Vibes, came out in 1963 on United Artists with saxophonist Curtis Amy, real jazz credentials laid down years before anyone called what he'd do next "crossover..."

For more on Roy Ayers:

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/co-roy-ayers/

or head on over to r/CrossoverJazz

u/stnr_on_failure — 6 days ago
▲ 10 r/Jazz

Hubert Laws: From the Jazz Crusaders to CTI's Boldest Crossover Records

Hubert Laws performing at the Jakarta International Java Jazz Festival, March 6, 2010. (Photo: Azwari Nugraha, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Hubert Laws grew up the second of eight children in a musical household in Houston's Studewood section, born November 10, 1939. His mother sang, his grandfather played, and most of his siblings went on to music careers too, including saxophonist Ronnie Laws and vocalist Debra Laws, whose 1981 album Very Special Hubert would later produce himself. He picked up flute in high school and, by 1954, was already playing alongside a young group of Houston musicians who would go on to become the Jazz Crusaders. He stayed with them until 1960, the year he won a scholarship to Juilliard...

For the full profile:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrossoverJazz/comments/1vmfor1/hubert_laws_from_the_jazz_crusaders_to_ctis/

u/stnr_on_failure — 8 days ago
▲ 5 r/IsraelJazz

Ehud Ettun and a Pianist in Japan Have Been Making Records Together for 15 Years

Ehud Ettun performing in 2015. (Photo: Európa Pont, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-ehud-ettun/

r/IsraelJazz

Ehud Ettun and a Pianist in Japan Have Been Making Records Together for 15 Years

Ehud Ettun, an Israeli double bassist and composer born in Jerusalem on May 21, 1987, has spent the last decade and a half in a duo with Japanese pianist Haruka Yabuno. They recorded BiPolar together in 2014, and in January 2024 they released Knights of Silence, a record that's deeper and more intimate than the first one. That's not a session credit. That's fifteen years of two musicians from opposite sides of the world choosing to keep playing together, record after record.

Ettun started on piano at 6 and picked up guitar at 12, playing in Jerusalem bands before he ever touched a bass. At 16 he was accepted to the Israel Arts and Science Academy, where he studied upright bass under Michael Klinghoffer, ear training under Professor Bat-Sheva Rubinstein, and composition under Andre Hajdu. After the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, he headed to Boston for a master's degree at the New England Conservatory of Music, studying with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist Fred Hersch.

His own catalog as a leader is bigger than it looks from the outside. Since his 2008 debut, Half Voices Half Colors (made with pianist Uriel Herman), he's put out seven albums as bandleader or co-leader: Heading North (2012), Raw Gestures (2013), BiPolar (2014), Collage of Moments (2016), Deep in the Mountains (2019), and now Knights of Silence (2024). Deep in the Mountains has the best story behind it: it came out of a 40-day artistic residency in the mountains of PyeongChang, South Korea, tied to the region's 2018 Winter Olympics cultural program, and the record mixes traditional Korean song and Argentine folk with Leonard Bernstein and modern Israeli jazz. Most of that catalog sits on small or self-run labels, which is also why Discogs only has two of his seven albums logged under his own name. If you've never heard of him, that's the reason, not a knock on the music.

He's also a first-call sideman. Ettun has recorded and performed with pianist Fred Hersch, saxophonists George Garzone and Eli Degibri, pianist Kenny Werner, and Anat Cohen, whose own spotlight ran here earlier this project. He's played the Blue Note in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with tour stops in Boston, Toronto, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Back in 2019, Ettun told the Times of Israel he was "giving myself 10 years to make it" in New York, with a longer-term plan to return to Israel and open a music school in the Negev desert. He's already acting on it: his newer project, the Internal Compass Collective, is based in Mitzpe Ramon, the desert town that gives the record label its name. The bassist who's spent fifteen years commuting musically to Japan is also building something permanent at home.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 9 days ago
▲ 22 r/japanesejazz

Casiopea - Two Tokyo Teenagers Started a Band in 1976. It's Still Touring and Immensely Popular in 2026.

Casiopea (2015 lineup), promotional still. (Photo: Paddock Music Co., CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Casiopea on Jazzprofiles.com

Issei Noro and Tetsuo Sakurai met in Tokyo in 1974, still in high school. Two years later they started a band called Casiopea. Noro is still leading it fifty years on, the only member who's never left.

Keyboardist Minoru Mukaiya joined in 1977, and the band's self-titled debut arrived May 25, 1979, with Randy Brecker and Michael Brecker sitting in as guests. That's before the rhythm section most fans picture first was even in place. Drummer Akira Jimbo didn't join until 1980, completing the lineup that carried Casiopea through its most influential run.

If you're picking one album to start with, make it "Mint Jams." Recorded live over two nights at Tokyo's Chuo Kaikan Hall (February 23 and 24, 1982) and released that May on Alfa Records, it was named album of the year by Japan's own jazz press. It's the sound of a band that had spent three years touring together, caught on tape before a live audience instead of smoothed out in a studio.

The lineup kept moving after that. Sakurai and Jimbo left in 1989 over conflicts with their side projects, replaced by bassist Yoshihiro Naruse and drummer Masaaki Hiyama in 1990. Noro froze the band's activities entirely in 2006, then brought it back as "Casiopea 3rd" in 2012, renamed it "Casiopea-P4" in 2022, and reverted to the original name in 2025 with pianist Jun Abe rounding out the current lineup. They released a new album, "True Blue," in August 2025, and have tour dates booked across Japan and Los Angeles through 2026.

Here's the part that still gets me: "Mint Jams" isn't done being discovered. Around 2018, YouTube's recommendation algorithm started pushing the album hard as part of the site's City Pop rediscovery wave, handing a 1982 concert tape to listeners who weren't alive when it was recorded. A limited clear-green vinyl repress followed in 2025. A two-night gig in Tokyo is still finding new ears more than four decades later!

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 9 days ago
▲ 72 r/japanesejazz

Ryo Fukui - He Didn't Touch a Piano Until He Was 22. Six Years Later, He Made a Reissue Classic.

Ryo Fukui at the piano. (Photo: ShahnazShahnaz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/japanesejazz

Ryo Fukui grew up nowhere near a conservatory. He picked up the accordion at 18, and it wasn't until 1970, at age 22, that he taught himself piano, working it out by ear against records by Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and Bud Powell. No formal training, no teacher, just a turntable and stubbornness.

Six years later, on September 7, 1976, he walked into Yamaha Hall in Sapporo with a trio, bassist Satoshi Denpo and drummer Yoshinori Fukui, and recorded "Scenery." It barely registered in the US at the time, released into a jazz market that had mostly moved on. Decades later, it's one of the records the whole Japanese jazz reissue boom points back to, and "Early Summer" in particular gets cited constantly as the track that hooks new listeners.

He followed it a year later with "Mellow Dream" (1977), same trio, same Yamaha Hall, this time mixed at AOI Studios in Tokyo. Two albums in, and the arc could have stopped there. It didn't.

A Bebop Education, Decades In

In 1992, well into his own career, Fukui met American pianist Barry Harris on a trip to the US. Harris became his mentor, sharpening his bebop vocabulary and technique in a way self-teaching off records never could. It's not the usual mentorship story, a young player finding a master early. Fukui was 44, already a bandleader with two records behind him, still willing to be a student. Harris kept dedicating performances of "Fukai Aijo" to Fukui's memory for years afterward, right up until Harris's own passing in 2021.

The rest of the catalog is small but sharply drawn. "My Favorite Tune" (recorded June 4-5, 1994, released the following year) is a solo piano session, pressed privately in a run of just 1,000 copies and sold mostly at his own gigs. It's a real rarity now. "Ryo Fukui In New York" (recorded February 1999 at Avatar Recording Studios) put him in a trio with two American players, bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer Leroy Williams, cutting standards on their own turf.

The Club He Built to Keep Playing In

In 1995, Fukui and his wife Yasuko opened Slowboat, a jazz club in Sapporo. It became a room where local players and touring musicians crossed paths, the kind of listening bar culture that's shaped Japan's jazz audience for decades. His final album, "A Letter from Slowboat" (2015), was recorded live there, trio with bassist Takumi Awaya and drummer Ittetsu Takemura.

Fukui was awarded the Sapporo Culture Encouragement Prize in 2012, recognition from the city that had been his home base the entire time. He passed away on March 15, 2016, at 67. Yasuko still runs Slowboat.

His records didn't slow down after that. "Scenery" in particular has kept climbing: a half-speed-mastered vinyl reissue from Switzerland's We Release Jazz in 2018 is now one of the most wanted pressings in the whole reissue scene, with 3,700-plus collectors keeping it on their want list and copies already sitting in nearly 13,000 collections on Discogs alone. A pianist who started from nothing at 22 ended up with a debut record that a new generation is still discovering.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 10 days ago
▲ 210 r/japanesejazz+1 crossposts

What do you all think of City Pop? It's a genre that blends Japanese Pop with Jazz. I personally really like it.

u/Flimsy_Complaint_830 — 9 days ago
▲ 4 r/IsraelJazz

Ziv Ravitz Just Released a New Duo Album. He's Also the Drummer Behind Many of his Contemporaries' Albums.

Ziv Ravitz at Cosmopolite in Oslo, playing a 2022 concert with Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter)'s band. (Photo: Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

Ziv Ravitz Just Released a New Duo Album. He's Also the Drummer Behind Many of His Contemporaries' Albums.

Ziv Ravitz, an Israeli jazz drummer, composer, and sound engineer born in Beersheba in 1976, put out Warp & Weft on May 1, 2026, on PK Musik, the label run by bassist Petros Klampanis, whose own trio Ravitz also plays in. It's a duo record with French saxophonist and clarinetist Christophe Panzani, eleven tracks recorded over two years, built around the two of them continuously swapping who leads and who supports (the title is the metaphor: sometimes warp, sometimes weft). The string quartet Quatuor Kaija guests on two tracks. Ravitz is touring it now, including a run at Paris's 38Riv Jazz Club. It's also a good excuse to catch up on a drummer whose name keeps turning up in the credits of artists that had already been spotlighted on our sister site,
www.jazzprofiles.com.

Ravitz started on drums at 9 and was gigging professionally in Beer-Sheva and Tel Aviv clubs by 13. In 1999 he became the house drummer backing touring guest artists at Tel Aviv's Camelot Jazz Club, then moved to the US in 2000 and graduated Berklee College of Music in 2004 with a degree in jazz composition before settling in Brooklyn.

That's where he co-founded Minsarah, a trio with pianist Florian Weber and bassist Jeff Denson. It became more than a side project: alto saxophone legend Lee Konitz chose Minsarah as his own working band, recording Deep Lee with them in 2008 and a live album at the Village Vanguard in 2010. Getting picked as a bebop-era legend's rhythm section in your twenties is not a small credential.

From there, Ravitz turned into one of the most-recorded sidemen without a spotlight of his own. He spent six years in the Shai Maestro Trio across four albums, played on Gilad Hekselman's Far Star, backed Omer Klein on three early records, and has a long-running relationship with pianist Yaron Herman, including producer credits on two of Herman's albums. He's also the drummer on three records with Avishai Cohen, the trumpeter (not the bassist we introduced here first): Naked Truth, the electric fusion project Big Vicious, and Ashes to Gold.

He's not only behind the kit, either. Ravitz mixed Christoph Irniger Trio's Octopus and the Shai Maestro Trio's Untold Stories, and co-produced two Yaron Herman albums. As often as he's playing the session, he's running it.

As a leader, his catalog is smaller but distinct: Images From Home (2009), then No Man Is An Island (2019), his first album as principal composer, built around a trio format with no piano or bass at all: just drums, saxophonist Will Vinson, and guitarist Nir Felder.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 11 days ago
▲ 17 r/Jazz

Come Sample Paolo Fresu, the Trumpeter Who Turned a Miles Davis Cassette Tape Into a Career

Paolo Fresu alla Cantina Bentivoglio

r/ItalianJazz

Paolo Fresu was eleven years old, playing in his hometown marching band, when a bandmate handed him a cassette of Miles Davis. That's the moment people point to when they explain how a kid from a Sardinian town of under 3,000 people ended up with more than 600 recording credits to his name.

Born February 10, 1961, in Berchidda, Fresu started on trumpet in the town's "Bernardo De Muro" band before that Miles Davis tape redirected him toward jazz. He trained formally at the Cagliari Conservatory, graduating in 1984, and in the early 1980s he played the Siena Summer Jazz Seminars, where trumpeter Enrico Rava heard him and was impressed enough that Fresu spent the next decade building a national reputation off the back of it. He turned down a full scholarship to Berklee's summer program around that same period, choosing to keep building his career in Italy instead...

More on Paolo Fresu?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ItalianJazz/comments/1vjuqjw/introducing_paolo_fresu_the_trumpeter_who_turned/

or

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/it-paolo-fresu/

Where to start listening:

  • Mare Nostrum (2007, with Richard Galliano and Jan Lundgren) for the trio format that's defined a big part of his catalog since
  • Things (2006, with Uri Caine) for a different side of him, trumpet and piano only, nowhere to disappear into a bigger band
  • His official platforms for tour dates and new releases

Paolo Fresu alla Cantina Bentivoglio

u/stnr_on_failure — 11 days ago
▲ 2 r/IsraelJazz+1 crossposts

Ehud Asherie Never Went to Jazz School. He Grew Up Inside Smalls Instead.

Ehud Asherie performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival, 2015. (Photo: Jeff Dunn, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-ehud-asherie/

Ehud Asherie Never Went to Jazz School. He Grew Up Inside Smalls Instead.

Ehud Asherie, a stride and swing jazz pianist born in Israel in 1979, never set foot in a jazz conservatory. He picked up the tradition the way players did a century ago: on the bandstand, from the people who actually played it.

His family left Israel when he was three, first for Italy, where he grew up attending the British School of Milan, then for New York when he was nine. As a teenager he started showing up at Smalls, the basement club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and he made his first appearance there while he was still in high school, sitting in on the late-night sessions that became his real music school. His teacher wasn't a professor. It was pianist Frank Hewitt, a Smalls regular who mentored him directly at the club instead of in any classroom.

That apprenticeship shows in everything Asherie plays now. His style runs on stride and swing, the New York piano lineage that runs through James P. Johnson, Erroll Garner, and Thelonious Monk, a different lane from the modal, ECM-associated sound of pianists like Shai Maestro.

He's been recording under his own name since Lockout in 2007, and the catalog kept growing from there: Welcome to New York (2010), Wild Man Blues (2019), and, released in January 2025, Thank You, Barry Harris!, a duo record with trumpeter Bruce Harris on Arbors Records, the Florida label known for classic swing and Dixieland jazz, built as a direct tribute to bebop pianist Barry Harris. Harris, who passed away in 2021 after a seven-decade career preserving the bebop language, mentored generations of players himself. It's a fitting bookend: a pianist who learned this tradition by sitting at a mentor's side is now, two decades later, passing that same tradition forward on record.

Somewhere along the way Asherie also picked up a second music entirely. Since 2003 he's been one half of Bina & Ehud, a duo with Brazilian guitarist Bina Coquet, playing real Brazilian samba and choro, not a jazz musician's take on it from the outside. Running two serious traditions in parallel for twenty-plus years is not a common resume.

He also has a real Grammy connection: he's one of the pianists, credited alongside Mark Shane, Peter Mintun, and Rossano Sportiello, on Boardwalk Empire Volume 1, the HBO soundtrack that won the 2012 Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. If you've heard that show's music, you've heard him.

Where to start listening:

r/IsraelJazz

u/stnr_on_failure — 13 days ago
▲ 105 r/Jazz

**Introducing Enrico Rava, the Trumpeter Who Switched Instruments After Hearing Miles Davis**

Enrico Rava, 2017; Av Hreinn Gudlaugsson. Lisens: CC BY SA 4.0

r/ItalianJazz

Enrico Rava didn't start out on trumpet. He picked it up after hearing Miles Davis, and decades later he's part of the reason a new generation of Italian jazz musicians picked up their own instruments in the first place.

Born in Trieste in 1939, Rava spent his early career in Rome before landing in New York in the late 1960s, right in the middle of the city's free jazz scene. He worked alongside players like Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy during those years, a period that sits at odds with the more melodic, spacious sound most listeners associate with him today. That contrast matters: the New York years are where Rava earned his credibility with the jazz establishment, before he found the sound he's actually known for...

For more on Enrico hop over to r/ItalianJazz

or https://www.reddit.com/r/ItalianJazz/comments/1vh9hg2/introducing_enrico_rava_the_trumpeter_who/

u/stnr_on_failure — 14 days ago
▲ 3 r/IsraelJazz

Amos Hoffman: The Guitarist Who Turned Oud Into a Jazz Instrument

Amos Hoffman performing with Avishai Cohen at Treibhaus, Innsbruck, 2009. (Photo: Svíčková, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

Amos Hoffman: The Guitarist Who Turned Oud Into a Jazz Instrument

Amos Hoffman, a jazz guitarist and oud player born in Jerusalem in 1970, started on guitar at age 6 and picked up the oud a few years later. Most players who add a second instrument treat it as color. Hoffman built his whole career on making the two sound like one continuous idea, studying Middle Eastern music formally with Lebanese oud and ney player Bassam Saba after he'd already been through the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem (today part of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance) and out playing jazz clubs in Amsterdam and New York.

Those New York years put him on stage early with drummer Dennis Charles, saxophonist Sam Newsome, trumpeter Duane Eubanks, and a young bassist named Avishai Cohen, a connection that turned into two decades of recording and touring in Cohen's band. Omer Avital was in that same circle too, and years later played bass on Hoffman's own 2015 album "Back to the City," alongside drummer Vince Ector and trumpeter Duane Eubanks. One of that record's ten tracks is called "Alone In South Carolina," written before Hoffman had any idea he'd actually move there.

He released five solo albums between 1999 and 2015: "The Dreamer" (1999), "Na'ama" (2006), "Evolution" (2008), "Carving" (2010), and "Back to the City" (2015). In 2013, Israel gave him the Landau Prize for Arts and Sciences, a national award run by the Mifal HaPais lottery that recognizes outstanding achievement across culture, research, and the arts, one of the country's most prestigious honors in the category. He didn't coast on it. The next year, in 2014, Hoffman and his wife moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he became a working part of building the jazz scene from the ground up, teaching at the ColaJazz Academy and playing with the SC Jazz Masterworks Ensemble.

Ten years after the prize, in 2024, Hoffman released his sixth album, "Minor Operation," his debut for Jojo Records, with Return to Forever drummer Lenny White and bassist Santi Debriano behind him. It's a small, three-piece session built entirely around what his guitar and oud can do without anything else in the way.

He's also still building something new on the side. Since January 2016, Hoffman has co-led a quartet with Canadian pianist Noam Lemish under the name "Pardes," Hebrew for orchard, playing jazz arrangements of Jewish melodies from Kurdish, Yemenite, Moroccan, Ladino, Russian, and Israeli traditions. The group has toured North America, from New York and Toronto to San Diego, in the years since.

Where to start listening:

u/stnr_on_failure — 15 days ago
▲ 3 r/IsraelJazz

Rotem Sivan: The Israeli Guitarist Who Plays Fewer Notes Than He Could

Rotem Sivan performing in Krakow, Poland. (Photo: RyanCampbellMgmt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

r/IsraelJazz

Rotem Sivan: The Israeli Guitarist Who Plays Fewer Notes Than He Could

Rotem Sivan, a jazz guitarist and composer, grew up in Israel before building his career in New York. The New York Times critic Ben Ratliff put his finger on what makes Sivan worth hearing: "He plays a lot of notes. But he is quiet: almost always quieter than someone with this much training and musicality tends to be, and this is what makes him more than a very good young guitar player." That restraint, more than any flashy technique, is the whole story. DownBeat's Bill Milkowski called him "a remarkable talent and a welcome new voice on the scene." Neither critic is talking about a newcomer coasting on promise. Sivan has been releasing records since 2013, and most listeners outside the New York jazz scene have never heard a note of it.

He trained classically first, earning a composition degree from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University, before moving to New York in 2008 to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. A year later he won the Montreux Jazz Festival International Competition, the storied Swiss jazz festival. The prize paid off fast: by summer 2010, the Rotem Sivan Group was booked at Switzerland's Bern Jazz Festival on a bill with the McCoy Tyner Quartet, sharing a stage with a pianist who spent the 1960s as one of John Coltrane's closest collaborators.

From there, Sivan built a discography one record at a time. His debut, Enchanted Sun (2013), came out on the venerable Danish label SteepleChase Records. His follow-up, For Emotional Use Only (2014), moved to the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent and earned 4.5 stars from DownBeat, a trio session with Haggai Cohen Milo on bass and Mark McLean on drums. A New Dance followed in 2015, also on Fresh Sound New Talent, then Antidote in 2017 and My Favorite Monster in 2018, five albums in five years without repeating himself.

After a longer gap, Sivan returned with Dream Louder in January 2024, and in August 2025 he released Heart Thieves, his most personal record yet, written in the rush of new fatherhood after the birth of his twins. Seven albums between 2013 and 2025, and he's still the same player critics keep describing the same way: someone who says more by holding back.

Where to start listening:

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/il-rotem-sivan/

u/stnr_on_failure — 16 days ago
▲ 5 r/smoothjazz

Stanley Turrentine Replaced John Coltrane in 1953. He Spent the Next Four Decades Doing the Opposite.

In 1953, bandleader Earl Bostic needed a new saxophonist. The one he'd just lost was John Coltrane, who was about to spend the next decade pushing jazz improvisation further out than almost anyone before him. The 19-year-old Bostic hired into that chair was Stanley Turrentine, a Pittsburgh native who built the next four decades of his career on nearly the opposite instinct: fewer notes, a thicker tone, and a blues player's sense of when to lay out. Coltrane kept asking how far a solo could go. Turrentine kept asking how much it could say with less...

Continued at https://www.reddit.com/r/CrossoverJazz/comments/1vdj91d/stanley_turrentine_replaced_john_coltrane_in_1953/

www.jazzprofiles.com

r/CrossoverJazz

u/stnr_on_failure — 18 days ago