At the Room 427

Album review

One of the initial batch of 2018 releases in BBE's "Jazz Masterclass" reissue series of worthy-but-forgotten jazz albums from Japan, Koichi Matsukaze's Earth Mother sounded relatively straightforward. Laid-back and bluesy, and embellished with solid flute-playing, it was reminiscent of Eric Dolphy at his most inside (and was also perhaps a good "what-if" thought experiment as to what Dolphy would have been doing had he lived to see the 1970s). However this disc —recorded just a year earlier—is an entirely different beast, and, oddly, not all that unlike some of Dolphy's most challenging work. While Earth Mother feels loose and mainstream, At the Room 427 bristles with a kinetic and daring sort of electricity. Recorded live in a university classroom in 1975, the album kicks off with a confrontationally aggressive bass solo and free-jazz percussion yielding to a blistering 20-minute jam that's nowhere near as silly as its title ("Acoustic Chicken") may lead you to believe. From the swinging interplay of "Theme Of Seikatsu Kojyo Iinkai" to the cheeky, Blakey-esque stylings of "Little Drummer" the intensity doesn't let up. A run through Billie Holiday's "Lover Man" introduces itself in an expectedly low-key and melancholy manner, but winds up being the track that shines the brightest light on Matsukaze's full-bodied and highly emotive approach to the saxophone. His playing here drifts in and around the melody line in the song's first half, before completely redefining the number with some incandescent soloing and stunning improvisation in the second. It's a remarkable reworking of a well-worn number and indicative of where this young player's heart and mind were at the time. Given its origins—do any university classrooms sound good?—the album is of surprisingly high fidelity, with a wide soundstage that manages to feel nonetheless quite intimate, making it another solid addition to what has, to this point, been an exceptional series of reissues. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz