Masayuki Takayanagi

2026 Re-issue. A cornerstone of postwar Japanese free improvisation, captured before three thousand listeners at the ninth Moers New Jazz Festival on 26 May 1980 and issued later that year as TBM-5023. By this point Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi had spent more than a decade refining his theory of mass projection - a model of collective improvisation in which the ensemble operates not as a sequence of soloists but as a single density field, modulating texture rather than line - and the New Direction Unit had been pared down to its definitive form: Kenji Mori on alto saxophone, alto flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and shinobue; Akira Iijima as a second electric and gut guitarist; Nobuyoshi Ino here on cello rather than his usual bass; Yasuhiro Yamazaki on drums and percussion.

The four pieces are explicitly political. Bohimei (epitaph) opens with German narration recounting the death of Aikichi Kuboyama, a crew member of the fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru fatally irradiated by the 1954 American thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll. Resistance 1 is dedicated to the South Korean dissident poet Kim Chi-Ha, then imprisoned for opposing the Park Chung-hee regime. Mass Hysterism and a refracted reading of Lee Konitz's Subconscious Lee complete the set. Takayanagi's noise-as-method discipline reaches one of its most concentrated public statements here, abrasive and architectural at once, the cello and twin-guitar configuration opening textural possibilities that the pieces fully exploit.