Gatefold LP edition + OBI.  There are few figures in improvised music quite like Akira Sakata. A marine biologist by training, he surfaced in the early 1970s inside the Yamashita Yosuke Trio, one of the most ferocious units Japanese jazz has ever produced, and for half a century since he has gone entirely his own way: bandleader, relentless collaborator, singer of strange incantations, a man who can make an alto saxophone sound like grief and slapstick in the same breath. Born in 1945 near Hiroshima, eighty years old now in a year that marks eighty years since the war, he hands this one over almost humbly, which is not a word you often reach for with him.

In a Sentimental Mood is the first record by his new trio Akira Sakata SOS, with pianist Nana Omori and his own son on drums, Manabu Sakata. They open with the Duke Ellington ballad you think you know, all velvet and nostalgia, and then Omori climbs onto the tips of her shoes and starts demolishing the piano, until the whole thing tips over into something gloriously unhinged. Six pieces, from a Catalan folk lament (Song of the Birds) and a Kumamoto lullaby (Itsuki no Komoriuta) to two free blowouts plainly titled SOS 1st and SOS 2nd, signing off with Hatahata, Sakata's own ode to a fish, because the marine biologist never quite leaves the room. Mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke, who knows exactly how loud to let it get, and wrapped in Juri's painting Chaos of small monsters, which is about right. First time on vinyl, on Sakata's own Daphnia label: tender one second, terrifying the next, gone before you can file it.