Masayuki Takayanagi

2026 Repress. Captured live on a single night — 26 June 1963 — at the Ginparis café in Ginza and held back from release until 1972, when Takeshi "Tee" Fujii founded Three Blind Mice and chose it as the label's ninth title, Ginparis Session is the foundational document of Japanese free jazz. The recording captures the 新世紀音楽研究所 (Shinseiki Ongaku Kenkyūjo, "New Century Music Research Institute"), the study collective convened by Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi and Masahiko Togashi as a workshop committed, against the cool-jazz orthodoxy then prevailing in Tokyo, to a music that could absorb the implications of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor on Japanese terms.

The roster is, in retrospect, almost the entire postwar canon caught in early form: Togashi and Hiroshi Yamazaki on drums, Hideto Kanai and Kunimitsu Inaba on bass, Masabumi Kikuchi and a twenty-one-year-old Yosuke Yamashita on piano, Terumasa Hino on trumpet, Sadanori Nakamure and Kyohei Uyama sharing guitar duties with Takayanagi. The opening Greensleeves — Takayanagi with Kanai, Inaba and Togashi — is widely regarded as the first fully realised free improvisation recorded in Japan, a performance that arrives at its own conclusions about texture, density and collective listening without recourse to any imported template. The remaining readings (Nardis, If I Were a Bell, Obstruction) operate in modal and post-bop registers but carry the same restless intelligence. A historical document and a working record at once, restored here at the Supreme Collection price point.