Hideto Kanai

*2026 stock* Bassist Hideto Kanai was one of the most ambitious composer-bandleaders to emerge from the Japanese jazz scene of the early seventies, a writer of long-form pieces that integrated free playing with chamber-jazz architecture, and a player with the patience to leave space where lesser arrangers would clutter. Q, only the sixth release on Three Blind Mice, is one of his most uncompromising early statements: extended group playing built around Kanai's slow, structural bass lines, with the horns and rhythm players free to disrupt and rebuild the form.

Closer in spirit to the European free scene of the same years than to American hard bop, the record sits at a particular crossing point in early-seventies Japanese jazz, a moment when local players were finally working out what an independent label catalogue might look like, away from the major-label house style. Kanai would go on to make several other landmark TBM records (Concierto de Aranjuez, Ode To Birds); Q is the one that established the framework. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.