Home » Jazz Articles » Masabumi Kikuchi
Jazz Articles about Masabumi Kikuchi
Producer Sun Chung: Always Listening for a Story
by Tyran Grillo
On April 28, 2021, a quiet masterpiece marked the end of an era--and the beginning of another. Hanamichi was to be the last studio recording of Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who died in 2015, two years after its creation. And yet, while its sweeter overtones struck balance in the bitterness of his absence, the album marked the birth of Red Hook Records, an independent label run by producer Sun Chung. Kikuchi's uncanny ability to tell a story was an organic ...
read moreMasabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi — The Final Studio Recording
by Neri Pollastri
Esce postumo, a inaugurare l'etichetta Red Hook, questo album in solitudine del grande pianista giapponese Masabumi Kikuchi, che molti ricorderanno per le collaborazioni con Gary Peacock (epica quella del 1971, Voices) e Paul Motian, su tutte il formidabile e geniale trio Tethered Moon. Registrato nel 2013, due anni prima della sua scomparsa, il lavoro vede il pianista—allora settantatreenne e già fortemente sofferente e debilitato—misurarsi con uno Steinway su cinque brani: un'improvvisazione, delle quali era maestro, una sua composizione e tre ...
read moreSolo Pianists from Japan
by Jerome Wilson
These are two recent solo piano releases from Japanese players. One is the latest dispatch from a prolific musician. The other is a farewell statement from a deceased artist. Satoko Fujii Hazuki Libra 2021 Satoko Fujii has been amazingly prolific in the last few years, releasing a bevy of recordings in all sort of configurations, from solo piano and duets with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, to various small groups and ...
read moreMasabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi The Final Studio Recording
by Pierre Giroux
Masabumi Kikuchi is not the kind of jazz pianist who just strikes the keys to produce a sound. He has a Zen-like approach to the instrument by making it an extension of himself, and thus both constructs and hears the music produced as a different form factor. There are and were other contemporary pianists such as Bill Evans, Denny Zeitlin and the late Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould, musicians who perhaps may fit into this category, but Kikuchi was a ...
read moreMasabumi Kikuchi: Black Orpheus
by Dan McClenaghan
Black Orpheus, the solo piano CD from Japanese-born pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, may be the starkest, loneliest music in the world. Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015) was a versatile, if ultimately idiosyncratic artist. Early in his career he worked with a panoply of mainstream music makers, everyone from drummer Elvin Jones, to producer arranger Gil Evans, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson and pianist/composer Mal Waldron. But he proved--from 1990 on--too individualistic, a musician with no technique (or so he said), who never ...
read moreMasabumi Kikuchi / Ben Street / Thomas Morgan / Kresten Osgood
by Jakob Baekgaard
The German poet, philosopher and literary critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) had an affinity for the fragment as an art form and in his Athenaeumsfragment 206, he wrote about it, saying that: “[a] fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog." Like a true Romantic poet, Schlegel saw the unique potential of the fragment as something that could point ...
read moreMasabumi Kikuchi Trio: Sunrise
by AAJ Italy Staff
Ad un primo ascolto di Sunrise ci si potrebbe domandare quanto in questa musica diafana, reticente e sospesa sia dovuto alla scrittura e quanto all'improvvisazione. Poi, anche leggendo le informazioni del libretto, si comprende che si tratta di improvvisazione collettiva, ma sempre indirizzata dal leader verso un pensoso e malinconico progredire, verso un ascolto reciproco quasi telepatico, sotto la soglia di un'intenzione ritmicamente motoria o melodicamente accattivante, verso un intreccio minuto in cui il non detto, i silenzi, gli accenni ...
read more
Giveaway
Days remaining: 7
