Keiichi Yoshida

New release “Music Forever”
and caught live February 21 at Sometime

Keiichi Yoshida—piano
Teiji Sasaki—bass
Yasushi Hiroe—drums

“Music Forever” captures Kiichi Yoshida at the head of his regular piano trio. Yoshida makes no apologies for his straight-ahead, hard-bop approach. He simply plays too quickly and fluently to slow down for anything. The trio has a practiced, comfortable interaction that only comes from experience. The tunes are standards, except for Yoshida’s two crisp originals. They all are nicely arranged and fall right under the spell of his complicated, two-handed approach to working through rapid chord changes and the twists and turns of the melodies.  He slows down at points, such as on “Angel Eyes,” but afterwards the trio is raring to go again. Many piano trios sound good in the studio but Yoshida’s sounds even better live. At his live show February 21 at Sometime, Yoshida’s approach was intense and focused. He stayed bent over thekeyboard, with hardly a break to even announce the tunes. At a few points, this intensity overshadowed the trio’s flow. His strong-fingered style interfered with just letting the melody line follow its own inner logic. But, that was more than made up for by the vibrancy of his attack. On the recording, their momentum is more evenly distributed. The bass of Teiji Sasaki and drums of Yasushi Hiroe feel perfectly matched to this style. They know when to pump up the volume or speed up the tempo slightly, and when to get out of the way of the forward momentum. Their solos live lent an important change in texture to the atmosphere, so it is too bad they don’t have more solo time on the CD. The choice of tunes is interesting, but the originals, “Don’t Disturb” and “Everybody Likes Something About You” are good enough to want more. Hopefully, he’s working on that right now.