Masayuki Takayanagi

2026 Repress. Recorded over three December days in 1979 at Epicurus Studio in Tokyo and issued the following year, Cool Jojo documents a side of Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi that sits at considerable remove from the noise-as-method work he was simultaneously pursuing with the New Direction Unit. The guitarist's Second Concept was his vehicle for an explicit return to the Tristano school — the lineage he had absorbed as a young player in postwar Tokyo and never fully set aside — and the programme makes the allegiance unambiguous: three pieces from the Lee Konitz book (Hi Beck, Palo Alto, Subconscious Lee), two from Lennie Tristano (317 East 32nd, Lennie's Pennies), a reading of Kenny Ball's Froggy Day, and a pair of Takayanagi originals (These Things, My New Flame).

With Kenji Kohsei on piano and electric piano, Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and Yasuhiro Yamazaki on drums, Takayanagi pursues the long-line, harmonically extended phrasing that defined the Tristano circle — clean tone, contrapuntal alertness, an insistence on melodic logic over rhetorical heat. Heard against his concurrent free work, the record reads less as retreat than as method study: a player demonstrating that the discipline he was dismantling elsewhere remained intact at the source. The Supreme Collection reissue restores the original eight-track sequence and adds four alternate takes from the same sessions.