This CD of big band jazz is quite unusual. Jazz musicians usually turn to passion or love affairs for inspiration, but this recording turns to Japanese history.

She’s not out to impress, she’s out to create beauty.

Bloodest Saxophone jumps into the beat and squeals and groans with so much pleasure it’s impossible not to be infected with their lust for a musical good time.

Yoshio Suzuki’s excellent release, “Generation Gap,” starts out not with a generation gap but a cultural gap: traditional Japanese wadaiko drums bumping under a dirty blues trumpet line.

The outing is a straight-ahead gem.

Country blues fingerpicked on acoustic guitar has no better player in Japan than Tokio Uchida.

Yamamoto’s sleek, straight-ahead CD kicks off with “Bohemia After Dark” and stays in that cool bop groove for the next ten cuts. The recording lays down robust

This interlinked set of compositions dig right into various grooves that let everyone in the band lean forward and play. The original composition, more one composition then the ten listings suggest, flow

After the first listen to “Dojo,” I was pleased to see the old Japanese phrase that roughly translates as “Volume One.” Inside the powerful music these two intense musical personalities create on “Dojo”