Kei Akagi Trio

Caught Live April 5, 2003 at NARU

Kei Akagi—piano
Tamaya Honda—drums
Tomokazu Sugimoto—bass

Kei Akagi started out the evening innocently enough with the lovely “Evening Hymn.” The lead melody had a prettiness to it that the trio soon turned into a ceaseless torrent of brilliant playing that flowed for the entire of their two sets. Though he has several excellent releases out to date, Akagi’s piano has never sounded more dynamic than with the live backing of Tamaya Honda on drums and Tomokazu Sugimoto on bass. Like a pot on the boil, the trio bubbled over again and again with rich ideas, textures and directions.

“No Ticket, No Entry” had a fractured lyricism, with Akagi’s piano runs fluctuating between nimble, upward lines and explosive, heavy plunges. This internal Jekyll-and-Hyde dialogue between classic piano trio style and free jazz catharsis formed much of the intriguing tension of the group. The other creative source was the back-and-forth of Sugimoto’s thick bass rhythms and Honda’s fluid texturing. Even the interspersed cooler numbers, “The More I See You” and “Don’t Explain,” barely contained the energy waiting to spring forth. The moods they created on these bluesy numbers were simmering with exciting, though subdued, energy. Other than those two songs, the trio played straight out.

On the third song, “Vertical Fragments,” the trio really opened up, with Honda’s solos holding the melody lines in a kind of rhythmic echo, while Akagi played with dense clusters of accented beats almost like a percussionist. Both of them spun around Sugimoto’s anchoring force of sturdy bass notes. Whether playing Akagi’s originals, such as the very pretty “Glance,” or working on standards such as Lee Konitz’s “Sub-conscious-lee” or Benny Golson’s “Stablemates,” the trio traded duties, always knowing where the other two would be. This interaction sounded effortless and allowed for interesting trajectories. Their free playing, though, always came straight from the gut, rather than feeling like an exercise in formlessness.

Partially, it is simply their high level of musicianship that carries them through the wilder passages, but it is also a kind of confident curiosity. The band explored the interior of the songs, without being squeamish to cut them open. That constant feeling of opening up the tunes was enhanced by the way they mixed elements: funkiness with minimalism, roughness with cool, blues with rapid-fire lines. They kept the right balance of “out” and “in” and the youngish crowd responded wildly to every direction they followed.

The trio was preparing for recording, but their intimacy went beyond that to being a fundamentally similar sensibility. Fortunately, their recording of many of these new tunes, penned by Akagi, will be available this summer before the start of Akagi’s annual summer tour. As director of the University of California at Irvine Jazz Section, Akagi spends most of the year in the U.S. There’s nothing overly academic about the trio’s sound, though. They are an exciting piano trio that should not be missed during their upcoming summer tour of Japan.