Gilles Peterson has spent his entire career buoyed by gushing enthusiasm, but when the London-based DJ and record label boss declared a gig in Tokyo on May 4 to be a "career highlight," he was probably being sincere.
The Twitter outburst came during the climax of Worldwide Session, a scaled-up version of the annual Worldwide Showcase concerts that Peterson used to host at Tokyo's Liquidroom venue. Club-jazz crowd-pleasers Soil & "Pimp" Sessions were sharing a stage with famed trumpeter Terumasa Hino, and the tune they were playing — Hino's propulsive 1981 cut, "Merry Go Round" — was one with special significance to Peterson: it had been a source text for the U.K. acid jazz boom that he helped spearhead in the late-1980s.
Hino's headline collaboration with Soil & "Pimp" Sessions proved to be an entertaining, if lopsided, affair. Given the band's reputation for sustained athleticism in their live sets, it was interesting to see how they accommodated a strutting alpha-male ego like Hino, one of the only Japanese jazz musicians who could be described as a household name. Soil's regular trumpeter, Tabu Zombie, visibly eased up when the band's big-name collaborator left the stage, but saxophonist Motoharu proved more game, sparring in an energetic flurry of back-and-forth riffs.