The Tokyo Sessions, the dazzling new album project by Dutch alt sax icon Benjamin Herman, oozes a deep affinity for the Land of the Rising Sun. In 2024 and 2025,  Herman – along with bassist Thomas Pol and drummer and The Tokyo Sessions album producer Jimmi Jo Hueting – found themselves knee-deep in Tokyo’s hyper-eclectic musical underbelly – districts like Shimokitazawa and Koenji where underground scenes in the city continue to flourish. Minds were ceaselessly and consistently blown: noise artists, freejazz anarchists, math punk outfits... each murky basement a Pandora’s Box of surprising genre-shattering sounds.

Enraptured and infected, Herman, Hueting and Pol found a box of their own to explore their own out-of-the-box mentality to music. Under the deft hands of analog recording sage Akihito Yoshikawa at his legendary Studio Dede – the trio bundled their collective chops to forge fresh sounds through time-honored means. Joining them are some of Japan’s most esteemed names in Japanese music, namely venerated composer/jazz musician Otomo Yoshihide and tenor sax maverick Tomoaki Baba – who stole
thunder on the soundtrack of Tachikawa Yuzuru’s Blue Giant (2023).

Shinpei Ruike also returned to perform, as well as two accomplished practitioners of traditional Japanese woodwinds: Akihito Obama on shakuhachi and Ko Ishikawa on sho. Having such riches in energy and eclecticism bore almost too much fruit. Through live instrumentation, sampling and recording – Herman and his hermanos enter a collective space of feeling, where styles like freejazz, noise and new wave  coalesce within the same express lane. Guided by the inspired production chops of Hueting, The Tokyo Sessions became an album where friendships translate into a tapestry of distinct sounds and sensibilities, bundled together in a chaotic, high rolling adventure.