condition (record/cover): NM / EX (sticker removal residue on back)
No insert nor obi.
Strip away the eighteen-piece orchestra, the noh chanting and the tsuzumi, and what is left is a pianist who came up in Tokyo listening to Bud Powell records until she could play them from memory. Finesse puts Toshiko Akiyoshi in a small-group setting for Carl Jefferson's Concord Jazz and lets her do the thing she almost never got to do on record: simply play. Bop vocabulary, absolute clarity of touch, an unhurried sense of swing, and just enough of her own compositional strangeness slipping in at the edges to remind you who is at the keyboard. The title is not false modesty. It is a fairly accurate description.
Japanese pressing, Concord Jazz. The great arranger heard as the great pianist she also was.
