Shunzo Ohno

*2026 stock* Trumpeter Shunzo Ohno spent much of his career moving between the Japanese scene and the New York post-bop circuit, a player whose résumé runs through American bandleaders alongside his domestic work, and whose tone bears the marks of both worlds. His quintet date for Three Blind Mice is one of the records where he sounds most explicitly engaged with the modal and spiritual currents of seventies American jazz: Coltrane shadows everywhere, but absorbed into a particular Japanese poise rather than imitated.

The writing gives the trumpet plenty of stretching room over slow-burning vamps, while the rhythm section keeps a tight discipline that lets the harmonic openness register without drift. The solos build in long, careful arcs (Ohno is a player who plans his ascents), and the band as a whole sounds like it has had time to live with the material. One of the more outward-facing records in the Supreme Collection, and a clear document of the Japanese-American conversation that shaped a significant slice of the seventies jazz scene. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.