Masabumi Kikuchi - Japanesque: Six Elements - Air - Hybrid SACD

2026
Masabumi Kikuchi — known to fellow musicians simply as "Poo" — stands as one of the most singular figures in the history of Japanese jazz. Born in Tokyo in 1939, he came of age absorbing the records of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington before going on to study at Berklee College of Music and forging deep creative bonds with some of the greatest names in the music: Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Gil Evans, Gary Peacock and Paul Motian. His career spanned post-bop, electric fusion, solo piano and, in the 1980s, a radical plunge into pure electronic sound that produced one of the most elusive bodies of work in his vast catalogue.

Japanesque: Six Elements is that body of work — a six-part suite conceived as the soundtrack to a 15-hour film, recorded at Cracker-Jap Studio in Brooklyn between 1986 and 1988. Following his electric jazz-funk albums Susto and One-Way Traveller, Kikuchi devoted the majority of his decade to this project: a solo real-time synthesizer performance of extraordinary depth and ambition, programmed with Lance Massey and engineered by Joe Blaney. Air (空, Kū) — the fifth of the six elements drawn from Buddhist cosmology — unfolds across four vast movements, from the brief, crystalline opening of AIR I to the immersive, 23-minute expanse of AIR II. It is music that breathes, hovers and dissolves, occupying a space entirely its own. Now reissued for the first time as part of a landmark 6-title SACD hybrid series on Rings / Disk Union Japan, the entire cycle has been remastered by Taylor Deupree — founder of the 12k label and a key collaborator of Ryuichi Sakamoto — whose deep sensitivity to electronic texture and spatial sound makes him the ideal custodian of Kikuchi's legacy. An indispensable rediscovery.