Sunao Wada Quartet
Now's The Time
*2026 stock* A live document from the legendary “5 Days In Jazz” festival in Tokyo in March 1974, and one of the most ambitious multi-band albums in the Three Blind Mice catalogue. The record gathers some of the most important working units of the moment: bassist Isao Suzuki and guitarist Sunao Wada sharing the front of the stage, the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio holding things together from the rhythm section, and the George Otsuka Quintet stepping in with the alto-led horn front-line that defined th…
Coco's Blues
*2026 stock* Guitarist Sunao Wada spent the seventies as one of the most consistently working figures in Japanese jazz, a player whose tone owed something to Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell but whose phrasing carried a particular Japanese weight, more thoughtful than driving. Coco's Blues, an early release on Three Blind Mice, alternates quartet and sextet formations across the programme, and the shift in scale gives the record a real architectural interest.
The smaller settings let Wada's line…
Blues World
*2026 stock* An earlier Sunao Wada outing on Three Blind Mice, recorded with both quartet and quintet formations across the programme, and built (as the title suggests) around the blues. But this is blues in the broader, more searching sense the seventies were beginning to articulate: harmonic frames borrowed from soul and modal jazz alongside the standard 12-bar architecture, and an improvising attitude that's more interested in development than display.
Wada's guitar carries the writing with t…