Vista Records Releases Latest Mabuchi Album

Yuko Mabuchi at the piano (courtesy of Blujazz Promotions and Booking)

I first became aware of Japanese jazz pianist Yuko Mabuchi this past August when Yarlung Records released her trio album Yuko Mabuchi Plays Miles Davis. This was a concert recording taken from a performance in Cammilleri Hall on the campus of the University of Southern California, and her trio colleagues were Del Atkins on bass and Bobby Breton on drums. Not too long after this encounter, Vista Records, which had produced Mabuchi’s first two CDs in 2011 and 2014, respectively, released her latest album, a two-CD set entitled simply Yuko. This was another concert recording, this time of a performance by the same trio at the Vibrato Jazz Club in Los Angeles, where Mabuchi has been living since 2016.

This is a far more diverse album than the Davis tribute offering. However, within that diversity, the listener will encounter new approaches to two of the tracks from that earlier recording, “All Blues” and “So What,” both of which are undisputed Davis “classics.” Both of these, of course, are best associated with the Kind of Blue album that Davis made with John Coltrane; and this new release gives a nod to one of Coltrane’’s most memorable compositions, “Giant Steps.” Mind you, the intervallic leaps suggested by the title are less imposing for a keyboardist; and Atkins’ work on bass guitar establishes a funkier rhetoric than one finds on Coltrane’s Giant Steps album. However, this simply reinforces the premise that Mabuchi and her trio know how to bring perfectly valid new approaches to past compositions that have attained “classics” status!

The fact is that Mabuchi drew upon an impressively wide diversity of sources in preparing for this particular concert gig. George Gershwin is there with “I Got Rhythm” but so is Antônio Carlos Jobim with “Só Danço Samba” (to which Mabuchi adds her own vocal work). Then, for “something completely different,” she ventures into Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and “Ain't No Mountain High Enough” by the Motown “dynamic duo” of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. There are also a few nods to Mabuchi’s origins with both traditional and pop selections from Japan.

What is interesting, however, is that, to the best of my knowledge, none of the sixteen tracks in this collection originated in a jazz trio led by a pianist with bass and percussion. Mabuchi’s performances are not just a matter of drawing upon familiar tunes from the past. It is also a matter of “transplanting” those tunes and then “fertilizing” them to thrive in “new soil.” There is a side of me that is more than a little curious about whether Mabuchi is interested in delving into Bill Evans’ book; but so much of that book emerged from the abundant diversity of trios that he led. There is more risk that an Evans selection would be too strongly influenced by its past discography, while all of the selections on Yuko demand creative invention, not only from the leader at the keyboard but also from the two-man “rhythm section.”