Naruyoshi Kikuchi Dub Sextet

Tokyo Kinema Club
May 20, 2009

Naruyoshi Kikuchi – tenor sax
Pardon Kimura – dub engineer
Tamaya Honda – drums
Masato Suzuki – bass
Shinpei Ruike – trumpet
Masayasu Tzboguchi – piano

The Tokyo Kinema Club was packed for the latest semi-annual concert from Kikuchi’s fabulously popular and energetic Dub Sextet. Few jazz musicians can pull in as big a crowd as Naruyoshi Kikuchi, and fewer still for the right reasons, as he does. The strangely converted dance club he chose to play felt more like a set from a David Lynch movie than a traditional jazz place. However, it was a good, big space to let the large crowd stand and dig the new style jazz of the sextet.

The sextet does not put really put in dub as in Jamaican reggae, but dub in terms of splicing in a variety of styles, moods and ways of playing. The music was in turns, modal, straight-ahead, four beat, lushly balladic and occasionally stretching out into free jazz. In short, good strong muscular music, energetically played. Many in the audience might have been drawn by the slick, cool polish of the performers. This isn’t the old school jazz of most clubs in Tokyo, but one where the musicians dress in designer black. Regardless of what got them into the club, they got a stellar evening of intense music. The all-standing crowd loved every minute of the show.

Kikuchi and company may have spent time discarding, and then updating, the trappings of ‘old’ jazz to bring in a different crowd from the usual jazz clubs, but the main point of the evening was not being cool but playing music. The musicians in the band are a who’s who of the best young jazz musicians in Tokyo. Each one of them has their own recordings and self-led bands to their credit. Yet, they play together as if they had been out on the road every night together for months. As in all the best jazz bands, their individual technique adds up to much more than the whole. The synergy of the band really drives the music. They interact fully and deeply. Each of them has more to say than any soloing space allows, but their phrasing, timing and improvising sense made each solo seem majestic and richly envisioned. It is a band with an abundance of everything that makes jazz such a deep pleasure.

The evening roughly followed the set list of their recent live CD. Those who liked that CD might have wanted a few new tunes, but the ones on that CD and the group’s debut recording are very open works. The songs have so much complexity and nuance to them, they are repeatedly productive. The mixed in sounds of the dub engineer spice up the proceedings, of course, but really everyone in the band offers nicely integrated sounds from outside the traditional jazz borders. The tensions and frictions each member creates resolve and resolve again into satisfying waves of sound that pushed all the borders. This endlessly full-on sound kept the large audience entranced.

Any traditional jazz fan would ask: How does Kikuchi pack in so many people? The answer is simple: he’s good. The solos of all the members were intelligent without trying to appear so, cool without being self-directed and balanced in all the right ways. This band has plenty of future ahead of it, but perhaps more importantly, plenty of present, too!