Yosuke Yamashita Trio - Chiasma (1976 Japanese MPS Vinyl LP)

Yosuke Yamashita Trio - Chiasma | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese MPS / BASF (KUX-2-P, Teichiku Records)

Yamashita formed his first trio in 1969 with Takeo Moriyama on drums and Seiichi Nakamura on saxophone, and it was already an unusual proposition. There is no bass in this music, and the absence is not incidental. Without a bassist holding the centre, the piano has to work as both harmony and rhythm section while the drums operate as a second lead voice rather than a timekeeper, and the saxophone is free to sit anywhere it likes. By the time Akira Sakata replaced Nakamura, the group had developed a language that owed something to Cecil Taylor and something to the European free improvisation scene without sounding much like either. Yamashita attacks the keyboard across its entire range with a percussive relentlessness. Sakata plays with a screaming, high-register intensity. Moriyama, who studied percussion at the Tokyo University of the Arts, is one of the most physically overwhelming drummers of the era. The trio toured Europe repeatedly from 1974 onward and found audiences considerably more receptive than the ones at home, which is a familiar story for free players of any nationality and a particularly acute one for Japanese musicians working outside the country's own jazz establishment.

The Heidelberg performance is structured to give each configuration room. "Double Helix" opens with Yamashita and Moriyama as a duo. "Nita" is a solo piano piece with a more impressionistic, tonal quality than anything around it. "Chiasma" brings the full trio in and stays there. Side B repeats the pattern: another Yamashita and Moriyama duo on "Horse Trip," a Moriyama drum solo on "Introhach," then the trio again for "Hachi," which was one of the group's core repertoire pieces alongside "Chiasma," "Clay" and "Mitochondria." The timing matters. Moriyama left the trio in 1975, so this is a document of the group close to the end of its original run, and he moved to Nagoya two years later to lead his own bands.

This is the September 1976 Japanese pressing on MPS / BASF KUX-2-P, manufactured and distributed by Teichiku Records.