Kenji Mori Quintet

*2026 stock* The title says it: a deliberate, joyful return to bebop fundamentals from the Kenji Mori quintet, recorded at a moment when the language could already feel like a stylistic choice rather than a default. By 1982 the Japanese jazz scene had moved through its modal, free and fusion phases, and Be-Bop '82 is in part a record about choosing to stand somewhere: a claim that the bebop vocabulary still had real things to say. Mori plays with the kind of warmth and confidence that comes from a player who has lived inside the idiom for a long time, and the band swings with the unforced ease of musicians who don't have to prove anything.

There are no surprises in the writing, but there's real generosity in the playing, and the recording (late Three Blind Mice, but still in the analogue tradition) gives the band a tactile presence. A record for listeners who came to jazz through Parker, Powell and Stitt, and want to hear the music kept alive. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.