Collection: Yosuke Yamashita

Yosuke Yamashita started on violin and didn't touch a piano until his teens. By 17 he was playing professionally. By his early twenties he was at the Kunitachi College of Music studying classical composition, meeting Terumasa Hino and Masabumi Kikuchi at a club called Gin-Paris every night to play and argue about jazz, and working out that what interested him was somewhere between McCoy Tyner's harmonic density and the uncharted territory that Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor were opening up in New York. In a Japanese jazz scene that was, by his own account, deeply conservative, that was a genuinely radical position. He formed a trio in 1969 and spent the following decade building one of the most physically committed free jazz practices in the world, with no bassist, just piano, alto saxophone and drums, the piano treated as a percussion instrument as much as a harmonic one. In 1973, when Japanese graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu asked him to perform for a short film, Yamashita played a burning piano. He was not wearing protective clothing. The first European tour came in 1974, the trio by then settled as Yamashita, alto saxophonist Akira Sakata and drummer Takeo Moriyama, and the performances at the Montreux and Berlin festivals established their reputation internationally. "Chiasma" (MPS, 1976), recorded live at the Heidelberger Jazztage in June 1975, is the document of that lineup closest to its end. In 1979 he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival, marking his American debut, and recorded with members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. From the late 1980s he rebuilt around a New York Trio with Cecil McBee on bass, Pheeroan akLaff on drums, and eventually Joe Lovano on saxophone. Yamashita, now in his eighties, remains active.