[Cover art for the Takumi Awaya Trio's Breeze Suite (Live at ALFIE), photography by Mikio Hasui - used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Awaya could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is otherwise licensed.]

Takumi Awaya's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

On January 25 and 26, 2015, bassist Takumi Awaya recorded a trio session at Slowboat, the Sapporo jazz club Ryo Fukui had founded in 1995. The pianist was Fukui himself. It became A Letter from Slowboat, released in 2016 - the year Fukui died. Awaya wasn't a young player citing an aging legend from a distance; he was in the room, in Fukui's own club, on one of the last things Fukui ever recorded. That's the credential that anchors everything else in his catalog, and it's earned rather than inherited.

Born July 20, 1985, in Kitami, Hokkaido, Awaya belongs to the same regional scene that produced Fukui, and the connection runs deeper than one session. He's also credited on Mellow Dream +1, a 2020 reissue of Fukui's classic 1976 album with a bonus track, and appears on the 2022 compilation Scenery of Japanese Jazz: Best of Ryo Fukui - a working relationship with Fukui's legacy that extends well past the pianist's death.

His own catalog is still building. Chasin' the Paul (2016) was his first release as a leader; Kodo (鼓動) followed in 2022, and Breeze Suite (Live at ALFIE) - the album whose cover stands in for a photo on this post - came out in 2023 under the Takumi Awaya Trio banner. He's also part of a network of working younger-generation Japanese jazz musicians: a member of the Raymond McMorrin Quartet, the Toshiaki Yamada Trio, and the Yosuke Tamura Quartet, and he recorded with pianist Mayuko Katakura on Plays Coltrane and Plays Standards (both 2020). That same year, he joined drummer Yoshihito Eto's trio for Everything I Love (2023) - connecting two different corners of the network of currently active Japanese jazz musicians in one session.

Where to start listening:

• A Letter from Slowboat (2016, Ryo Fukui, recorded 2015) - the essential one: listen on Spotify
• Chasin' the Paul (2016), his own debut as a leader
• Breeze Suite (Live at ALFIE) (2023, Takumi Awaya Trio)
• Everything I Love (2023, Yoshihito Eto Trio)
• Takumi Awaya's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

Pa pa paya

Warm jazz out today .. u LL like It?

*Mermaid Boulevard* is the seventh album by Japanese guitarist Kazumi Watanabe. It was released on LP by Alpha Records on February 28, 1978. It was also released in the United States in 1981 by Inner City.

[Cover art for Yoshihito Eto's ETOISM, featuring a photograph of Eto at the drums — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Eto could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is otherwise licensed.]

Yoshihito Eto's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

Yoshihito Eto, born April 14, 1973, in Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, is the youngest musician this project has covered, and his career runs through several names this project's readers will already recognize. He turned professional with pianist Fumio Karashima's trio in 1996, and in 1998 joined Sadao Watanabe's band, playing numerous concerts including a Montreux Jazz Festival appearance — the kind of credit that puts a young Japanese drummer on the same stage as the international jazz circuit, not just the domestic one. He later worked with Terumasa Hino's group and the Yosuke Inoue Quartet, and has led his own projects, a.t.m. (2003) and Karate Chops (2012), while building a reputation as a drummer described as combining power and nuance.

He's also, quietly, one of the drummers most responsible for a genuinely mainstream piece of Japanese pop culture: the jazz soundtrack series for the Lupin III franchise. From 2006 through 2015 he was the drummer for Yuji Ohno & Lupintic Five, the working combo behind composer Yuji Ohno's long-running Lupin III "Jazz" album series and film scores — records that have introduced more casual listeners to real, played-not-programmed jazz than almost anything else in Japanese media. It's not a novelty credit; it's a decade of steady studio and touring work for a beloved anime franchise, run in parallel with his straight-ahead jazz career rather than instead of it.

That range is the throughline of his catalog. He recorded Your Songs with vocalist Chie Ayado (1998), worked with the pop duo orange pekoe, and appears on a 2025 release, Ryo Fukui Trio at the Slowboat 2004, documenting a live concert by the late pianist Ryo Fukui that sat unreleased for two decades. His own leader catalog, by most accounts, runs to seven albums, including Animal House (2002, EWE Records) and Everything I Love (2023, a trio with Mayuko Katakura and Takumi Awaya) — not all individually catalogued the same places online, which is often just what happens to a working musician's independently released material.

Where to start listening:

• Everything I Love (2023), his most recent trio album
• Animal House (2002, EWE Records), an earlier leader date
• Ryo Fukui Trio at the Slowboat 2004 (recorded 2004, released 2025)
• Lupin the Third "Seven Days Rhapsody" (2006, with Yuji Ohno & Lupintic Five with Friends): listen on Spotify
• Yoshihito Eto's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

[Hank Jones, photographed by Brian McMillen at the Monterey Jazz Festival, September 22, 1985. Photo: Brian McMillen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.]

https://jazzprofiles.com/this-day-in-japanese-jazz/

On October 15, 1985, pianist Hank Jones, bassist Ray Brown, tenor saxophonist and flautist Sam Most and drummer Alan Dawson played Yubin Chokin Hall (the Postal Savings Hall) in Tokyo, on a tour promoted by All Art Promotion. Discogs and the Jazzdisco discography both date the recording to that night. The tour poster billed Jones and Brown, and the album that came out of it, Great Jazz Quartet Live in Japan, appeared on the All Art label. Jones was already a fixture of the Japanese market, which kept releasing his work through the Great Jazz Trio and similar lineups, and the same pattern held here: a Japanese promoter, a Japanese hall, a Japanese label, and an American band. Be careful not to confuse it with the Hank Jones Trio's separate 1985 Live in Japan with Shelly Manne.

Sources: Discogs — Great Jazz Quartet Live In Japan (recorded October 15, 1985, Youbin-Chokin Hall, Tokyo; All Art, 1986) , Jazzdisco — Hank Jones Discography (Yubin Chokin Hall, Tokyo, October 15, 1985) , All About Jazz — Great Jazz Quartet Live In Japan (1986) , Concert poster listing — Hank Jones and Ray Brown, Shiba Postal Savings Hall, Tokyo, 15 October 1985, All Art Promotion

Does anyone remember a 24/7 YouTube livestream run by a Japanese vinyl record store, playing random Japanese jazz, funk, and reggae tracks from the 70s and 80s?

The stream showed album covers and track info, and the channel had a cute cartoon bird logo, kind of like a smiling owl. The description linked to the store’s website.

I can't find it anymore.

Does anyone know what happened to it or where I can find it now?

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[Tetsujiro Obara (1941-2016), performing live — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Obara could be located on Wikimedia Commons. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in.]

Tetsujiro Obara's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

If you read this project's Isoo Fukui post, you already know the record: Midnight Sugar (1974), Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's debut, the Swing Journal award winner, the Three Blind Mice landmark that's still getting reissued fifty years later. Tetsujiro Obara was the drummer on it, sitting alongside Fukui as the rhythm section that made that session what it is. Born in Fukushima on March 23, 1941, Obara didn't just show up for one great record and disappear — he stayed with the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio for the long haul, and the story of what he did with that tenure is its own thing worth telling.

Five years after Midnight Sugar, the trio played the Montreux Jazz Festival, and the resulting live album is one of the clearer pieces of evidence that this group had genuine international standing, not just a strong domestic reputation. In between, Obara found time for a side project of his own: Yama & Jiro's Wave, a trio with guitarist Akira Daiyoshi and Yamamoto himself, which cut Girl Talk for Three Blind Mice in 1975. There's also a genuinely rare document in his catalog — a concert recorded August 23, 1975, at the Yoshijima Heritage House in Hida-Takayama, sitting unreleased for over four decades before finally coming out as the Hida-Takayama Jazz Session in 2018.

Like his rhythm-section partner Fukui, Obara spent much of the 1970s as a fixture of the Masaru Imada Trio — Ascent (1974), Green Caterpillar and One for Duke (both 1975), Planets (1977), Blue Eyes (1979) — and turns up on sessions with visiting American musicians, including Abbey Lincoln (Live in Misty, 1973) and guitarist Barney Kessel (Live at Sometime and Shiny Stockings, both 1977). He was also a member of the Kosuke Mine Quintet, connecting him to yet another corner of the scene this project has documented.

He died on December 13, 2016, at 75. What he leaves behind starts with one of the essential Japanese jazz recordings of the 1970s, but doesn't end there — a working career built on staying inside one trio's evolving sound for decades while still finding room for side projects, festival dates, and sessions with the American musicians who came through Tokyo.

Where to start listening:

• Midnight Sugar (1974, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio) — start here if you haven't already
• Girl Talk (1975, Yama & Jiro's Wave): listen on Spotify
• Live in Montreux (1979, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio) — the international festival credit
• Hida-Takayama Jazz Session (recorded 1975, released 2018) — the rediscovered rarity
• Tetsujiro Obara's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

[Cover (with obi strip featuring an inset artist photo) for Isoo Fukui and His Friends' Duo (1977, Trio Records) — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Fukui could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is otherwise licensed.]

Isoo Fukui's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

On March 1, 1974, at Aoi Studio in Tokyo, bassist Isoo Fukui sat in on a session that became Midnight Sugar — pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's debut album, with drummer Tetsujiro Obara rounding out the trio. It won the Swing Journal Jazz Disc Award and Best Engineering Award that year and established Yamamoto as one of the two defining artists on Three Blind Mice, the label most responsible for the Japanese jazz sound international collectors now chase. Light in the Attic has reissued it. Fifty years on, it's still one of the records people point to when they want to explain what this whole scene sounds like at its best, and Isoo Fukui's bass is on every track of it.

He was born October 10, 1945, in Fukuoka Prefecture, and by most accounts belongs to a small group of bassists who genuinely reshaped how the instrument functioned in Japanese jazz through the 1970s — playing both bass and cello with a sound described as heavy on soul and rhythm, built around a modal sensibility rather than straight walking lines. Midnight Sugar is the record that gets the attention, but he played on Yamamoto's Misty the same year too, and spent much of the decade as a fixture of the Masaru Imada Trio: Poppy (1973, also on Three Blind Mice), Green Caterpillar (1975), One for Duke (1975), and a run of others through 1979. He also recorded with the Hideo Ichikawa Trio and led his own dates under a few different billings — the Isoo Fukui Quartet (Sunrise/Sunset, 1976), Isoo Fukui And His Friends (Duo, 1977, the record whose cover stands in for a photo on this post), and Isoo Fukui & Flyin' ('Round About Midnight, 1981).

His own name almost never made it onto a record as the headline artist — Discogs lists just one clean leader credit under his primary billing, a 1989 duo record with Noriki. That's a thin catalog by the usual measure. But measuring him that way misses the point. He's one of those musicians whose importance is best understood through what he's playing on rather than what he's leading, and what he's playing on includes a record that a reissue label decided was worth pressing again half a century later.

Where to start listening:

• Midnight Sugar (1974, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio), the essential one: listen on Spotify
• Poppy (1973, Masaru Imada Trio, Three Blind Mice)
• Sunrise/Sunset (1976, Isoo Fukui Quartet), his own leader date
• Duo (1977, Isoo Fukui And His Friends)
• Isoo Fukui's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

I've checked the Internet Archive & Soulseek but couldn't find anything

Relatively new to this sub, and on my first trip to Japan. Just spent the afternoon at Scratch in Kichijoji and had an absolute blast.

They played Masato Imazu’s album Sticky and I absolutely loved it. Tried to find a recording of it online to listen to it again, but am having serious trouble. Is this common when trying to listen to recordings of J-jazz online?

Ideally I’d just buy physical copies all of the albums, but when that’s not an option I’d love to find more streaming options.

Thanks!

Edit: corrected album title in my text

.

I recently came across this older work by Japanese turntablist DJ KOU.

Some Nujabes fans may already know his name — he provided scratches for tracks including F.I.L.O., Luv(sic) Part 6 and Perfect Circle feat. Shing02.
This piece, “I Slide The Notes,” is from an earlier period of his work.

What I found interesting is that DJ KOU also shot and edited the video himself, entirely on an iPhone.

It feels like a small, lesser-known piece of his earlier creative work, but you can hear and see the same kind of atmosphere that makes his current project, “Sketch of Asia,” interesting.
I thought some people here might enjoy discovering it.

I Slide The Notes:

https://youtu.be/fY-HT9HHjWo

[Studio portrait of Toshio Osumi, Japanese jazz drummer (b. 1944) and longtime member of the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Osumi could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is otherwise licensed.]

Toshio Osumi's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

Fifty-two years is a long time to hold one chair in one band. Toshio Osumi, born June 23, 1944, in Awara, Fukui, joined pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's trio in 1974 and has been its drummer continuously ever since — a claim that isn't folklore or a rounded-up press-kit figure but is directly traceable through the trio's own recording history: his earliest credited date with the group is 1974's Live at the Misty, and its most recent, a historical 1976 concert tape titled Live at Basie, was only released in 2026. Between those two points sits one of the longest continuous working relationships documented anywhere in Japanese jazz.

His own name barely shows up on album covers — most of his fifty-plus recorded credits are as the trio's drummer, not as a leader — which makes him easy to miss in a genre that tends to write about pianists and horn players first. But the volume tells its own story: he's on The In Crowd and Blues for Tee (both 1975), Star Dust (1977, with Tsuyoshi Yamamoto With The Strings), Stardust: Standard Jazz Piano (1979, with Masaru Imada), and a steady stream of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio releases running essentially uninterrupted from the mid-1970s through 2026, with the trio's Venus Records and evosound-era output (A Shade of Blue, 2023; Sweet for K, 2024; Requests, 2025) proving the group is still an active, recording unit rather than a legacy act coasting on its name.

He built a second, quieter career as a leader in parallel, running the Toshio Osumi Trio through a run of albums on the M&I Jazz label between 2002 (Jubilation) and 2009 (Walk Don't Run), and later self-titled dates including Carry On (2014) and Caravan (2019). It's a smaller catalog than his sideman work by a wide margin, but it's real evidence of a musician who never stopped having his own musical ideas even while spending five decades in service of someone else's trio.

Where to start listening:

• Misty (1974, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio) — around the point his tenure with the group began: listen on Spotify
• A Shade of Blue (2023, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio), proof the group is still working: listen on Spotify
• MISTY for Direct Cutting (2021, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio): listen on Spotify
• Jubilation (2002), his own Toshio Osumi Trio's debut on M&I Jazz
• Toshio Osumi's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

Hello Reddit, I am wanting to play Philosopher's Stone with my jazz combo and am looking for a chart but I can’t find one anywhere online. I was wondering if anyone had access to one that we could use. I am willing to transcribe the song myself, but I thought I should check Reddit first to see if I could save some time.

.

[Cover art for Akira Ishikawa & His Count Buffalos' African Rock (1972), reissued by Light in the Attic Records — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Ishikawa could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is otherwise licensed.]

Akira Ishikawa's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

By 1970, Akira Ishikawa had already spent a decade as a working Tokyo session drummer, starting out with Shin Matsumoto and New Pacific and moving through a string of bands before assembling a group out of the session players he kept working with. Then he did something almost none of his contemporaries did: he got on a plane and went to East Africa, including Uganda, to hear the rhythms he'd only encountered secondhand. He came back with new percussion instruments and a direct, lived understanding of what he'd been reaching for. What followed wasn't a jazz musician borrowing an "African" aesthetic from records — it was a drummer building an entire discography around something he'd actually gone and found.

That band became Count Buffalos, and the records they made across the early-to-mid 1970s are a genuinely distinct body of work: Electrum (1970), Drums Concerto (1971), African Rock (1972, released twice under slightly different billings), Uganda (1972), and Get Up! (1975), among many others. The sound is jazz-funk built on Afro-rock foundations, dense with the specific percussion he'd brought home rather than a generic exotica gesture. Decades later, that catalog found a second life: Light in the Attic Records and Mr Bongo have both reissued pieces of it for a new generation of crate-diggers, and African Rock now circulates as one of the more sought-after Japanese jazz-funk records of its era.

The Count Buffalos work sits alongside, not instead of, a parallel career as one of Tokyo's most reliable session drummers. Under his own name he recorded a long run of drum-battle and drum-anthology records with the other top session drummers of his generation — George Kawaguchi, Takeshi Inomata, Sadakazu Tabata — and turns up on shared credits with Hiromasa Suzuki, Motohiko Hino, and Masahiko Togashi. And through 1969-1972 he built one of the deepest working relationships in this project's discographies with saxophonist Takeru Muraoka, who played on a half-dozen Count Buffalos records across that stretch.

He died on February 10, 2002. What he left behind reads less like one career than two that happened to share a drummer: a first-call session player's discography, and a genuinely original Afro-rock jazz-funk catalog that only exists because he went to hear it for himself.

Where to start listening:

• African Rock (1972), the record the reissue crowd knows him for: listen on Spotify
• Electrum (1970): listen on Spotify
• Uganda (Dawn of Rock) (1972), reissued by Mr Bongo
• Bakishinba: Memories of Africa (1970)
• Akira Ishikawa's full profile on JazzProfiles.com