Jazz Articles about Kaoru Watanabe

About Kaoru Watanabe

Album Review

Alicia Hall Moran: Coldblooded

Read "Coldblooded" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
March 16, 2026

Take a heart and cast it into water. Lower the temperature. Watch the surface tighten until motion turns into sculpture. What remains are rings expanding outward, movements frozen into memories. These are the contours listeners encounter on Coldblooded, the third meta-statement from singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. Sound travels across its surface as a skate blade tests structural integrity. History breathes beneath that ice, even as traumas wait behind winter's glaze. And so, the music begins its slow migration ...

Album Review

Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation

Read "American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation" reviewed by Katchie Cartwright

by Katchie Cartwright
December 18, 2024

Rhiannon Giddens is not afraid of big projects. American Railroad, the album, is part of a larger work, subtitled A Musical Journey of Reclamation, which Giddens initiated with the widely acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble, a diverse international collective of performers, improvisers and composers created by Yo Yo Ma. American Railroad digs into the building of America's transcontinental railway system, focusing on voices that have been missing from public narratives: voices of the laborers on whose backs the hard work fell, of ...

Album Review

9 Horses: Strum

by Neil Duggan
June 26, 2024

There are no prizes for guessing that this album from 9 Horses is called Strum because every track features the sound of a strummed instrument. There are over 20 stringed instruments involved, with mandolins, violins, guitars, banjos, basses and pianos, in various combinations, forming the main components. They are strummed, plucked or otherwise coaxed into life by a core trio of mandolinist Joe Brent, violinist Sara Caswell and bassist Andrew Ryan. Although there are many stringed instruments, that does nothing ...

Album Review

Hu Vibrational: Timeless

Read "Timeless" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
December 18, 2023

An Adam Rudolph recording is less a collection of musical pieces than of sound paintings. The elements he works with are musical ones--any instrument known to mankind might be used, and often even used to play notes--but traditions of form and melody tend to be tossed out the window from the start. The tones are treated as daubs of paint on a palette, splashed here and there whenever they will add something to whichever imaginary landscape he is evoking at ...

Album Review

Kaoru Watanabe: Néo

by James Nadal
April 13, 2016

Nostalgia, in Japanese, lightly translates into natsukashisa, a yearning for something from the past. American born, multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe has reverted to his ancestral Japan for inspiration on Néo, a synthesis of dignified taiko drumming with the jazz sensibility of improvisation. Prepared with a degree in jazz flute and saxophone performance, Watanabe spent a decade performing and touring with Kodo, the globally recognized taiko drum ensemble, and has contributed to the Silk Road Project. This recording of original compositions, is ...