Recording of the Week, Koichi Matsukaze Trio, 'At the Room 427'

At the Room 427 is the ninth reissue as part of Barely Breaking Even (BBE)’s ‘J Jazz Masterclass’ series, celebrating the seemingly endless pool of lost sounds from Japan’s early jazz scene. This particular record by saxophonist Koichi Matsukaze and his trio was originally issued in 1976 by ALM Records, itself a small imprint of Kojima Recordings founded just a couple of years prior by record producer Yukio Kojima. Both Matsukaze and ALM Records are still active today, though the label has since pivoted to releasing contemporary classical music and traditional Japanese ensembles. Resurrected from the archives by BBE, much like the rest of their J Jazz series At the Room 427 enjoys a lovingly-packaged repress, complete with reproduced artwork of the original album cover, as well as bonus sleeve notes with artist interviews and biographies, the same attention that went into last year’s excellent Kohsuke Mine reissue First, another one of our Recordings of the Week.

BBE’s J Jazz series sticks to the pre-’80s sounds, stemming from the immediate post-war sound of Japanese jazz when the genre was still very much drawing from the sounds of American players - the somewhat stigmatised ‘music of the enemy’ - but by the time we get to At the Room 427, things had started to change. By this point the Japanese scene was a little more up-to-speed with the sounds of free jazz; spurred on by these experimental sounds of other post-modal jazz developments, local jazz started to explore wilder concepts and break out of the typical standard-based bebop sound. For Matsukaze, it was spending his teenage years amongst the 1968-69 student protests that started to radicalise his playing style and move away from playing standards - indeed the only thing on Room 427 that resembles a jazz standard is the trio’s picking apart of Billie Holiday’s ‘Lover Man’. It’s perhaps for this reason that instead of Charlie Parker tunes, we get 20-minute originals like ‘Acoustic Chicken’ or the similarly lengthy ‘Little Drummer’, though familiar ‘head melody’-based structures still abide here. The record was actually recorded in a classroom - number 427, unsurprisingly - at Chuo University, Tokyo, the alma mater of both Matsukaze and drummer Ryojiro Furusawa, though on my initial listen I wondered if ‘Room 427’ was some small jazz club rather than a humble lecture room on the outskirts of the city. It was also record boss Yukio Kojima himself behind the recording deck on this one, and although the recording quality is a little on the scrappy side - Matsukaze, for instance, seems to sit firmly in the left-side of the mix - there’s a certain charm to it not unlike a good live bootleg.

Pictured: Koichi Matsukaze

This actually marks Koichi Matsukaze’s second reissue on BBE, his first being the 1978 recording Earth Mother back in 2018, which At the Room 427 predates by a few years. With Earth Mother being a proper studio production, it’s unsurprising that Matsukaze and co. play it a bit straighter and that the tunes are a little more focussed, less out-there than Room 427. Despite this, this record sees the trio meeting at a nice middle-ground between loose, freeform expressionism, and some fairly catchy numbers. It’s the lumbering sounds of bassist Koichi Yamazaki that opens the record, with an absolutely killer funky bassline starting off the opener ‘Acoustic Chicken’, who keeps things driving throughout the tune before the spotlight is pointed fully on him for a slick solo passage. Matsukaze showcases all he’s learned from the free improv school, undoubtedly drawing much from Dolphy and Coltrane, then there’s Furusawa who comes in with his own clattering drum solo right after. ‘Little Drummer’ is perhaps the other standout track on here, and with Matsukaze’s trio being chordless it may be a little anemic-sounding to some ears, but the juicy stuff here is the bandleader’s impressive saxophone acrobatics while Yamazaki’s bass keeps things contextual. The aforementioned ‘Lover Man’ cover is a pretty ruthless reconstruction, but still makes for one of the tamer cuts on the record despite Matsukaze still playing very ‘outside’.

If you can get past the slightly dusty recording, At the Room 427 makes for a pretty appealing package, and interesting insight into a long-gone period in Japan’s developing jazz scene. There’s the added mystique of the relatively low-key nature of the session itself, a small and intimate show being played to a classroom full of students that has the trio doing their best to make sure these youngsters were entertained. It’s thanks to the passion of BBE for this era of music that this recording can reach even more ears.