Mike Price Jazz Quintet: In Tokyo, Japan

Although the name Mike Price may be unfamiliar to you—unless, that is, you happen to live in or near Los Angeles or Tokyo—he has been around the block more than a few times, forging a lengthy and successful career that goes back to his time as lead trumpet for the Buddy Rich band and orchestras led by Stan Kenton, Gerald Wilson and Toshiko Akiyoshi, continuing thereafter as an in-demand sideman for groups of various shapes and sizes and leading more recently to a twenty-year part-time residency in Japan, where Price is a soloist with Nobuo Hara's popular Sharps & Flats and leads his own big band and quintet.

Price's smaller group is featured on the admirable album In Tokyo, Japan, recorded there in March 2011. While the liner notes don't explicitly say so, Price presumably wrote and arranged all or most the eleven tunes (there is one folk song, "Tohryanse"), which in many ways hearken back to Art Blakey's celebrated Jazz Messengers, Great Britain's Jazz Couriers and similar groups from the Golden Age of post-bop jazz. That's not to say the music is dated; on the contrary, it is emphatically advanced and up-to-date. The approach, however, spans decades to embody the best of what its predecessors had to offer while adding some late-model touches of its own.

While Price is an efficient albeit unassuming soloist, it is his supporting cast—all Japanese —whose unfaltering virtuosity sets the tone and helps redeem the album. Jazz has a higher profile and is generally looked upon more favorably in Japan than in the land of its birth, and that allegiance has given rise to a generation of musicians whose knowledge of jazz and ability to put that tuition to use are second to none. To phrase it another way, a more talented rhythm section than Price's would be hard to find, and not only in Japan, while tenor saxophonist Masanori Okazaki—out of the Eric Alexander / Grant Stewart school of unsuppressed swinging—generates excitement and approval whenever his name is called. As for pianist Hiroshi Tanaka, bassist Tadashi Saze and drummer Yoshinobu Inagaki, they are as tenacious in their support as they are sharp and resourceful in their solos.

The music, all of which is well-written and engaging, ranges from up-tempo romps ("Touch & Go," "Catch as Catch Can," "For the Love of Jazz") to minor blues ("Spiralization"), boppish nods to Charlie Parker ("Charlie, from Just Around"), Bishop Desmond Tutu ("Tutu's Birds of Passage") and Charles Mingus ("A Mingus Among Us," not the same tune written by Randy Brecker), an ardent quasi-ballad ("True Lover's Dreams") and semi-waltz ("Imagery"), as well as that luminous Japanese folk song. A tasteful studio session, well-planned and adeptly performed.