Sunao Wada Quartet, Sunao Wada Quintet

*2026 stock* An earlier Sunao Wada outing on Three Blind Mice, recorded with both quartet and quintet formations across the programme, and built (as the title suggests) around the blues. But this is blues in the broader, more searching sense the seventies were beginning to articulate: harmonic frames borrowed from soul and modal jazz alongside the standard 12-bar architecture, and an improvising attitude that's more interested in development than display.

Wada's guitar carries the writing with the unhurried, slightly grainy tone that became his signature, and the rhythm section moves with the kind of swing that belongs specifically to the Tokyo club scene of the period: looser than American hard bop, tighter than the freer end of the Japanese scene. A record that earns repeated listening through its consistency rather than through any particular peak, and a fine example of how the TBM house aesthetic could carry a guitar-led group. From the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500 reissue series.