Jazz Articles about Kazuki Yamanaka

About Kazuki Yamanaka

Album Review

Kazuki Yamanaka: Songs Unconscious-minded

Read "Songs Unconscious-minded" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
November 3, 2015

Alto and soprano saxophonist Kazuki Yamanaka has brought together an impressive array of talent to join him in producing Songs Unconscious-minded. The album's title is a reference to how the seven original tunes bubbled up from Yamanaka's unconscious and presented themselves. The supporting personnel is grouped differently on the various tracks: pianist Fabian Almazan, bassist Linda Oh and drummer E.J. Strickland are together on tracks 1 ("Let Go") and 8 ("HAMABE-NO-UTA -Song Of Seashore"); track 3 ("TA-KE-YA-BU") finds ...

Album Review

Kazuki Yamanaka: Songs Unconscious-minded

Read "Songs Unconscious-minded" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
October 5, 2015

Multi-reedist Kazuki Yamanaka is a newly-minted jazz musician, assimilated into New York City and in touch with all of the right friends. For his debut recording as a leader, Songs Unconscious- minded, Yamanaka has composed and arranged seven original compositions and one traditional Japanese melody, revealing in the bargain, a well-developed sense of musical self, possessing a calm but fearless creative nature. Central to the recording is the opener, “Let Go." It encapsulates Yamanaka's beyond post-bop vision and his proclivity ...