CR – 03 – 2015
Akane Matsumoto: piano
Peter Washington: bass
Gene Jackson: drums
When someone has embarked on a musical path is determining to identify and then deepen into a particular set or style in which the skills of a musician are ehnanced at their best.
Pianist Akane Matsumoto seems to have found it in her distinctive tendency to embed an impetus of swing to her approach in music.
Mainly influenced by pianist like Oscar Peterson and Phineas Newborn, this Japanese pianist seems to have developed a natural vocation and a sincere love for styles as be bop and hard bop, around which she has focused her music training. To better understand the aptitude for swing of Matsumoto, it’s emblematic an episode cited in the liner notes of this latest album by jazz critic Hoshino Toshihiko: «Many years ago, I attended a concert where Akane Matsumoto, in a sideman role, performed some original tunes by her leader and a few covers of modal jazz. […] When came the turn of an uptempo funkyer tune Matsumoto changed her attitude. Like a fish finally back in the water, she took out a solo full of swing which received an enthusiastic applause from the audience.»
Marked in her apprenticeship are a scholarship at Berklee College of Music, many prizes achieved in the best competitions for young talents as well as important collaborations with some of the finest Japanese jazz musicians. It didn’t take long for her interesting debut album “Fallin’ in Love with Phineas” (2008) to be released, tribute to the aforementioned pianist Phineas Newborn, followed by her first international recording in the Big Apple, “Playing New York” (2010), a good springboard for her live activity.
Now with this latest album Matsumoto gets back to the American recording experience joined by two of the best session men around, authentic rhythmic propellers of this piano trio, confirming a music approach predominantly aimed to those styles of the past which made jazz great. It couldn’t be a better start than a dynamic revisitation of Memories of You to underline all the knowledge and affection that the pianist feels for the history of this music.
The following Laurentide Waltz, wonderful composition taken from the Canadiana Suite by Oscar Peterson, first starts with an intro where Matsumoto proves her excellent control of dynamics and sound and then offers us an exemplary display of her smooth piano phrasing. With peculiar Japanese courtesy and kindness Matsumoto leaves plenty of room to her partner Peter Washington in Gentle Art of Love who, in this rendition of an old original by Oscar Pettiford, comes out with a powerful sound while playing the main theme or taking a solo filled with inspiration and vigour which sums up all of his experience.
Matsumoto, indeed, though provided with excellent technical skills, reveals a wise dispense of her abilities and knows the right moment to show them: a proof of great intelligence and sensitivity. Moreover, tunes like Moon River, or title track itself, denotes Matsumoto’s arrangement talent being able to rewrite the classics of jazz equipping them with freshness and bounce making full use of the trio format context and the qualities of her partners.
JJ, a driving original from the pianist, as she herself affirms in the liner notes, arises from that willingness to show how jazz shouldn’t always be addressed as a snob or too much intellectual music remembering us of its original matrix of spontaneous happyness and gaiety, a goal achieved by the trio thanks to its dynamic and irresistible playing of this fast-paced bebop-styled tune, among the best of the album. How Blues can hide itself even in the most unexpected situations, is shown by Matsumoto in her reinvented Danny Boy, an Irish folk traditional song elevated to jazz standard by jazzmen such as Art Tatum or Bill Evans, through deep feeling and an expressive taste moving all along the breathes and pauses dispersed in this her arrangement.
After a first part of the album prevalently deferent to the jazz Greats of the past and their legacy, Matsumoto selfcreates a more personal niche with Goodbye Mr. Miller, a composition written on the emotional tide of the late pianist Mulgrew Miller, passed away in 2013, another of her piano references, before closing with her Hometown. Here the pianist manages to translate in music that nostalgia that Japanese people often feel for their furusato, the Japanese word for “homeland”, in a all-consuming ballad from which exudes all the love for Tottori, the city where the pianist was born and bred. These feelings, so frequent in a modern Japan often Tokyo-centric, who causes the moving of many people from other parts of Japan to the capital metropolis, (looking for job, study or other reasons) comes to surface at the end of the album evoking the same bittersweet taste felt, as told by Matsumoto in the liner notes: «by those who come back to their native place to discover that some people you expected to meet again left or passed away and some new people took their places. […] Even if today I live in a faraway city, my heart is always in my hometown. I wish that this my composition could become for all the listeners the place of heart they’re longing to come back.»
The impression left in the conclusion of this recording is that of a real artistic account given by a still-growing musician, almost a a travel journal, provided with that vital approach and deep love for jazz with which Matsumoto lives her life, a feeling that the listeners can’t help but to be affected.
Links:
Akane Matsumoto official website: www.akanejazz.com
Memories of you’s digest : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9eNuWnekmg