Japanese Jazz Piano

Jazz reached Japan early, and it stayed. Dedicated listening cafes, the jazz kissa, began appearing in the late 1920s, and after the war they multiplied until Tokyo alone counted several hundred, each with a good stereo, a wall of imported records and an unspoken rule of quiet attention. For musicians and students who could not yet afford the discs, these rooms were a kind of conservatory. That habit of close, patient listening shaped the way Japanese pianists absorbed the American tradition and then made it their own.

The line of players runs deep. Toshiko Akiyoshi, born in 1929, was heard by Oscar Peterson in a Ginza club in 1953 and became the first Japanese student at Berklee three years later, going on to lead her own big band. Yosuke Yamashita, born in 1942, took the music the other way, into fierce free improvisation with the trio he formed in 1969. A later generation, among them Hiromi Uehara, born in 1979, whose debut Another Mind appeared in 2003, carried a restless, genre-crossing virtuosity onto concert stages worldwide.

What ties the style together is less a single sound than a sensibility: a fondness for lush, extended harmony, often close to the jazz-inflected chords of 1970s and 1980s city pop, set against clear, singing melody and a certain formal poise. Left and right hands tend to speak as distinct voices, which makes these pieces rewarding to take apart. Slow a recording down, or open a transcription in practice mode, and the inner logic of the voicings comes into focus one hand at a time.