A trio of highly master improvisers – Japanese veteran pianist Masahiko Satoh, known for his collaborations with Wayne Shorter and Gary Peacock but also with Peter Brötzmann, Joëlle Léandre and Paal Nilssen-Love among many others, his fellow countryman, experimental guitarist and sound alchemist Otomo Yoshihide and British free-improviser-drummer Roger Turner  – recorded its debut live album in February 2015 in the Japanese city Fukuya «Live at Hall Egg», A year and half later, in October 2016, this trio convened again and recorded a second live album, this time at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Pit Inn.

«Sea» features two free-improvised pieces. Satoh suggests a playful theme for the short, song-like «The Saw» while Yoshihide and Turner attempt to subvert his heroic efforts to establish melodic lines with urgent and chaotic whistling and percussive noises. The 31-minutes «On the Rock» is a totally different beast. Yoshihide takes first the lead with his electric guitar and offers a manic and uncompromising, free-associative stream of metallic sounds while Turner and Satoh follow his intense vein closely and keep pushing him even further into wilder, outer terrains. But after this frantic eruption Turner takes the lead and builds polyrhythmic layers and an evocative tension, while Yoshihide and Turner extend his ideas with minimalist, ritualist gestures. Then Yoshihide and Satoh ignite a tough, free-jazz kind of confrontational interplay. Yoshihide continues to act more and more as a free radical and eventually leads the trio into its climatic, powerful coda that surprisingly sounds playful as on the beginning of this inspiring set.

Eyal Hareuveni

Masahiko Satoh (p), Otomo Yoshihide (g, whistle), Roger Turner (dr, perc)