Toshiyuki Miyama, The New Herd

*2026 stock* Toshiyuki Miyama led The New Herd for decades, one of the most important and most adventurous Japanese big bands of the post-war period, and the working ensemble through which a remarkable number of Japanese composers and arrangers found a sympathetic home. Gallery shows the band in mature form, working through a programme that uses the full resources of the ensemble: brass-heavy passages giving way to chamber-sized features, dense ensemble writing setting up patches of open improvising, and the kind of dynamic range only a really first-rate big band can credibly deliver.

Miyama's leadership is felt as a curatorial as much as a directorial presence (he was the kind of bandleader who let his collaborators leave their fingerprints on the music), and the New Herd's reputation for taking on more ambitious writing than the average house band shows clearly here. A record for listeners who care about the Japanese big-band tradition, and one that holds its own alongside the better-known American large-ensemble dates of the period. From the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500 reissue series.