jazz

During his years in New York, pianist Makoto Ozone fronted a number of small combos and gigged with such heavyweights as Branford Marsalis, Gary Burton and Christian McBride. But the collaborators he has come back to time and time again are his Japan-based big ...

On a chilly Friday afternoon in December, trumpet player Toshinori Kondo reclines in the clutter of his Kawasaki recording studio, pours out two cups of shōchū liquor, and starts to explain what prompted him to abandon a lucrative career in Japan and move to ...

Who says you need soul to sing jazz? A humanoid robot vocalist was the centerpiece of an ensemble serenading onlookers at the Marunouchi Building near Tokyo Station on Wednesday. Viewed from a distance, the band looked like a regular quartet. Up close, the alluring female singer ...

The vibraphone is one of the more unique instruments to infiltrate jazz. A holy mash-up of the piano and the percussive, it's the duck-billed platypus of musical instrumentation. In terms of cool, it's unfairly lodged somewhere between the tuba and the clarinet. Its old-school ...

Sitting in a muddy field is taken as par for the course, and possibly even part of the attraction, at major summer festivals like Fuji Rock. But rain would certainly have put a damper on any jazz festival set in the heart of the ...

Trying to slot artists into specific trends, genres and an ever-expanding number of subgenres is a constant obsession for meticulous music fans looking to define what they're listening to. Journalists categorize, sometimes to the dismay of the bands they're covering, to make things simpler ...

Since launching in 2002, the Tokyo Jazz Festival has undergone a number of changes in terms of format and venues, and is now firmly established as one of the most important annual events on Japan's jazz calendar. Since moving in 2006 to its current home ...