Despite a 40-year age gap and the vast distance between Japan and Greece, pianist Masahiko Sato and guitarist Giotis Damianidis reveal themselves as kindred spirits on Thousand Leaves. Capturing their very first meeting—recorded live on February 2, 2024, at Jazz Spot Candy in Chiba, Japan—this album is a testament to the power of improvised music to dissolve boundaries of geography and generation. The rapport between Sato and Damianidis is so immediate and intuitive that one might imagine a much longer artistic partnership. On this recording, Sato remains at the acoustic piano, his improvisations drawing on a lifetime of classical cadences, post-bop runs, and the quicksilver logic of free jazz. Damianidis, meanwhile, brings an amplified guitar sound that channels the rawness of rock as much as jazz, producing sparks of distortion and effects-driven bends. Their interplay is thrilling: entwining, colliding, and constantly negotiating common ground without ever compromising their distinct voices.

Masahiko Sato is a towering figure in Japanese jazz and improvised music, known for his boundless curiosity and versatility. After early collaborations with Sadao Watanabe, studies at Berklee College of Music, and a return to Japan in 1968, Sato’s career has spanned free jazz, psychedelia, and film music, with collaborations ranging from Midori Takada and Jean-Luc Ponty to Anthony Braxton and Peter Brötzmann.

Giotis Damianidis’s creative path began in Thessaloniki’s underground rock scene, but soon expanded to embrace rembetika, Afrobeat, and, above all, improvisation. His journey took him to Rotterdam and Brussels, where he’s lived since 2006. A pivotal encounter with Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata in 2018 deepened Damianidis’s ties to the Japanese creative music scene, leading to the formation of the ensemble Entasis and multiple European tours. Thousand Leaves is not just a document of a first encounter, but the spark of an ongoing collaboration: following this recording, Sato and Damianidis toured Europe as a duo in late 2024, and Damianidis has since returned to Japan for further performances, including a quartet with Sakata and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. This album stands as an electrifying testament to the universality and immediacy of improvised music—a meeting of two singular voices, each expanding the other’s world.