New Arrivals / Last 4 weeks
Be-Bop '82
*2026 stock* The title says it: a deliberate, joyful return to bebop fundamentals from the Kenji Mori quintet, recorded at a moment when the language could already feel like a stylistic choice rather than a default. By 1982 the Japanese jazz scene had moved through its modal, free and fusion phases, and Be-Bop '82 is in part a record about choosing to stand somewhere: a claim that the bebop vocabulary still had real things to say. Mori plays with the kind of warmth and confidence that comes from…
Gallery
*2026 stock* Toshiyuki Miyama led The New Herd for decades, one of the most important and most adventurous Japanese big bands of the post-war period, and the working ensemble through which a remarkable number of Japanese composers and arrangers found a sympathetic home. Gallery shows the band in mature form, working through a programme that uses the full resources of the ensemble: brass-heavy passages giving way to chamber-sized features, dense ensemble writing setting up patches of open improvi…
Sunday Thing
*2026 stock* Another date from Toshiyuki Miyama's New Herd for Three Blind Mice, and a strong candidate for the band's most accessible single record. Sunday Thing leans into the warmer, more groove-conscious end of the New Herd's repertoire: there are still the harmonic ambitions and ensemble dynamics that made the band more than a swing-era throwback, but the rhythmic feel runs closer to the soul-jazz and groove-oriented big-band writing that was current at the time.
Long-form arrangements give…
Mari Nakamoto III
*2026 stock* The third album from singer Mari Nakamoto for Three Blind Mice, and the one that pushes hardest at the conventions of mainstream vocal jazz. The line-up is the giveaway: alongside Nakamoto's voice, the record places bassist Isao Suzuki at the centre of the rhythm section and brings in Kazumi Watanabe on guitar, the same Watanabe who would shortly become one of the major figures in Japanese fusion and progressive jazz. The result is a vocal record where the accompaniment is unmistaka…
Now's The Time
*2026 stock* A live document from the legendary “5 Days In Jazz” festival in Tokyo in March 1974, and one of the most ambitious multi-band albums in the Three Blind Mice catalogue. The record gathers some of the most important working units of the moment: bassist Isao Suzuki and guitarist Sunao Wada sharing the front of the stage, the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio holding things together from the rhythm section, and the George Otsuka Quintet stepping in with the alto-led horn front-line that defined th…
Active Volcano
*2026 stock* Nobuo Hara led Sharps & Flats for an astonishing run, well over half a century, and the band became one of the institutions of Japanese jazz, in roughly the same way the Clarke-Boland Big Band held its place in Europe. Active Volcano catches the ensemble in particularly muscular form: arrangements that draw on the funkier, groove-conscious end of seventies big-band writing, brass passages that hit hard without losing definition, and a sense of swing that belongs less to the swing er…