Sunao Wada Quintet, Minoru Ikeno

*2026 stock* A later Sunao Wada session for Three Blind Mice, and one of the more outward-looking records in his TBM run. The quintet-plus-one format brings the saxophonist and flautist Minoru Ikeno alongside Wada's working group, and the addition shifts the music's centre of gravity, opening up the writing to longer tones and more spacious harmonies. There's still plenty of the bluesy swing that runs through Wada's discography, but the textures here are wider: Fender Rhodes lacing through the harmony, percussion patterns that lean toward a quieter Latin feel, and improvising that takes its time to arrive at its peaks.

Several tracks make room for wordless vocal passages that function as another instrumental colour rather than as a frontline, a touch that gives the record a distinctly seventies Japanese flavour, somewhere between fusion's openness and the spiritual jazz scene's patience. One of the most stylistically curious entries in Wada's catalogue, and a useful corrective to the assumption that he was strictly a hard-bop player. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.