Tetsuo

Recorded in 1969, best known under the 1977 US reissue by Catalyst Records, Matrix is the first album as a leader of Masabumi Kikuchi featuring Tetsuo Fushimi & Hideyuki Kikuchi (if one ignores the album duet with Terumasa Hino in 1968). Matrix is obviously a masterpiece, released after significant experience years as sideman, close to various Jazz masters, it was conceived, reciprocally, on the saxophone overtones occurred by Hideyuki Kikuchi alongside Akio Nishimura on tenor. The track list constits in great variations selection of standards & covers rearranged with brio by Kikuchi, from Chick Corea (the amazing piano run "Matrix"), the modal "On A Green Dolphin Street" (based on the 1958 Miles Davis version), the Jazz Rock Baroque (Kikuchi using harpsichord) "If I Said The Sky Was Falling" composed for the TV drama "Matte Masu Wa" by Sadao Watanabe, and the bossa "Black Orpheus" composed by Luiz Bonfa, including two own compositions that completes magnificently the album : the original ballad, reminiscent of John Coltrane, "Little Aby", & "In Fourth Way".

By the time this, veteran pianist Eddie Higgins had become one of the most popular pianists in Japan, thanks in no small part to the independent label Venus Records. To commemorate its 10th anniversary with Venus, the label asked its fans which songs they would like to hear the Eddie Higgins Trio perform in their new album. Higgins chose 12 songs out of the top 25 and added two of his own choosing. It might be interesting for you to learn what songs are preferred by Japanese jazz fans.

This is a haunted, introspective album of piano-trio jazz very much indebted to Bill Evans and, to a lesser extent, George Shearing. Veteran Eddie Higgins mostly serves up standards from the Great American Songbook in a tasteful, unshowy, often gently swinging way, harmonically locked into the mainstream, occasionally throwing in a gentle quote for humor's sake.

Eric Alexander has had many opportunities to record as a leader for several different labels, though producer Tetsuo Hara, owner of the Japanese label Venus, has become a huge fan, recording him almost any time he travels to New York City. This is another superb outing by Eric Alexander on a freewheeling trio to compile a nine-track full of jazz's favorite staples from John Coltrane, Cole Porter and many more! There's a new sort of edge in Eric's horn, sided with the sublime work of Dezron Douglas on bass and Neal Smith on drums, which he displays throughout the set with a new great sense of spirituality.

A jazz pianist noted for his versatility and elegance, Derek Smith, originally from London, has been playing professionally in the US since 1957. He remains relatively unknown in the US but is strongly admired by fellow musicians and ardent fans. Following his successful debut Beautiful Love, a trio album, Smith went into the studio by himself this time to record a solo album at the suggestion of Venus producer Tetsuo Hara. A program of well-known touch and harmonic elegance, romantic and even dreamy interpretations and an undeniable sense of jazz and swing.

From its earliest editions, the Isola Jazz festival, first held in 2005, has hosted innumerable exponents of international jazz, including the great drummer Bobby Durham, to whom the festival has been dedicated since 2009. This beautiful live performance — recorded in Italy, but by a group of musicians who record for Japan's Venus Records label — easily one of the classiest jazz imprints of the past decade or two! And as a further twist, a number of the artists here are American — which makes the whole thing a great trans-national performance, handled with energy to match.

This book presents work collected through the Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) in 2019 (LEAP-ASIA-2019) following the LEAP-UCD-2017 whose results have been published as a first volume. In addition to the research targets set in the previous one, such as the repeatability, variability, and sensitivity of lateral spreading on mildly sloping liquefiable sand, this volume includes research efforts to validate the generalized scaling law (hereafter “GSL”) for the identical prototype with the one employed in UCD-2017. In LEAP-ASIA-2019, 10 institutes around the world conducted 23 tests in total. It was the first multi-institutional attempts to investigate the validity of the generalized scaling law for the saturated sandy sloping deposit with wide range of initial conditions. The experimental data provided a unique basis for assessing the capabilities of six different simulation platforms for numerical simulation of soil liquefaction. The results of the experiments and the numerical simulations are presented and discussed in papers submitted by the project participants.