BBE Music presents a meeting of musical spirits in a unique live recording captured just a few months before the world changed due to a global pandemic. Recorded in September 2019, Live at Café Oto sees two giant heavyweights of the post-war Japanese jazz scene come together with a pair of exemplary musicians from the heart of the new UK jazz movement. Generations and continents apart but united as one for a very special concert.
Together, performing at London’s leading space of innovative and exploratory music – Café Oto in East London – pianist and composer Masahiko Satoh and drummer Takeo Moriyama fuse their musical forces with saxophonist Idris Rahman and bassist Leon Brichard, at the time both members of Ill Considered, one of the UK’s most notable experimental jazz groups.
Masahiko Satoh and Takeo Moriyama are more than mere players of their respective instruments. They inhabit a higher realm, a space closer to icons or totems in their chosen fields. Both Satoh-san and Moriyama-san emerged as potent forces in the late 1960s – Satoh-san as an experimental and iconoclastic composer and pianist and Moriyama-san as the dynamo to the blistering Yosuke Yamashita Trio – a critical period in the development of free and modern jazz in Japan. A time that witnessed creative boundaries dissolve, new vectors of cultural transmission emerge and the very definition of ‘jazz’ undergoes intense and wide-ranging reframing by a new generation of artist. These artists eschewed prior conventions and forms and looked to construct a new musical vernacular.
That spirit of change and transformation is shared with the two younger players who accompanied them on that autumn Sunday evening in East London. As members of Ill Considered, reed player Idris Rahman and bassist Leon Brichard (Brichard has since left the group) were at the fulcrum of the burgeoning UK jazz and improvisation scene that has taken the world by storm in recent years. Ill Considered’s sound was – and remains – centred on free improvisation and, in their own words, ‘based loosely around simple pre-written themes or composed on the spot’. It was therefore natural that Idris and Leon were well matched to play alongside two seasoned veterans of the revolutionary free improvising scene of the late 60s and early 70s Japan.
Live at Café Oto presents a unique moment as generations meet in a unity of purpose to create a truly ecstatic experience that will not be forgotten by those lucky enough to be in the audience that night. That special moment can now be shared with you.
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