Sunao Wada Quartet, Sunao Wada Sextet

*2026 stock* Guitarist Sunao Wada spent the seventies as one of the most consistently working figures in Japanese jazz, a player whose tone owed something to Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell but whose phrasing carried a particular Japanese weight, more thoughtful than driving. Coco's Blues, an early release on Three Blind Mice, alternates quartet and sextet formations across the programme, and the shift in scale gives the record a real architectural interest.

The smaller settings let Wada's lines breathe at length (long blues phrases unfolding over walking tempos, with the kind of unhurried storytelling guitar players were still allowed to do at the time), while the larger ensemble passages bring a denser, more arranged feel that pushes the music into firmer hard-bop territory. The blues remains the centre of gravity throughout, but it's a blues drawn through the modal and post-bop filters of the moment. A solid early entry in the TBM catalogue, and a useful introduction to Wada for anyone whose Japanese jazz shelf is still light on the great guitar players of the scene. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.