Just found this new interview with the amazing bass player Yosuke Inoue. Really interesting and talks about his work with Kazumi, Terumasa, Masahiko, and many others.
[Image: Yosuke Yamashita, Tokyo, 2001. (Photo: Manel Armengol, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]
https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-yosuke-yamashita/
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:
I was so chuffed to find this record in Kyoto. Been wanting a copy for a long time!
https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-kohsuke-mine/
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:
Ryo Fukui at the piano. (Photo: ShahnazShahnaz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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:
Glad to have finally found Ryo Fukui’s “Scenery.”
Casiopea (2015 lineup), promotional still. (Photo: Paddock Music Co., CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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:
Mine is yugo kanno works from jojo
Sony Music Japan have announced today that four of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's most popular titles for Three Blind Mice are now available on streaming services.
Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, with wider availability across different artists! Thinking Isao Suzuki should be next...
Misty: Spotify / Tidal / Apple Music
Midnight Sugar: Spotify / Tidal / Apple Music
Girl Talk: Spotify / Tidal / Apple Music
Midnight Sun: Spotify / Tidal / Apple Music