Collection: Tsuyoshi Yamamoto

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto grew up on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture, started piano in elementary school, heard Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at some point in his high school years and understood what he wanted to do with music, and made his professional debut in 1967 as an accompanist to Japanese pop singer Mickey Curtis on a European tour while studying at Nihon University. By 1974 he had become house pianist at the Misty jazz club in Tokyo, and in the same year Three Blind Mice documented his playing with an unusual intensity: “Midnight Sugar,” “Misty,” “Blues for Tee,” “The In Crowd,” “Live at the Misty” and the collaborative “Now’s the Time” with Isao Suzuki and George Otsuka all appeared in 1974. It is a remarkable output from a single year, and the recording quality that Three Blind Mice applied to each session, the same audiophile standards that made the label’s name, means every one of them holds up as a document. The title track of “Midnight Sugar,” his own composition, has followed him through the rest of his career as his most associated piece, re-recorded and performed hundreds of times. The Analog Vault describes “Midnight Sugar” and “Misty” alongside Isao Suzuki’s “Blow Up” as the three records that defined what Three Blind Mice meant at its peak. He later spent a year in New York performing with Dizzy Gillespie, Carmen McRae, Elvin Jones, Sam Jones, Billy Higgins and Sonny Stitt, and performed at Montreux in 1979.