First gaining notice as a José James sideman and key collaborator, Takuya Kuroda has gone on to make his own mark in contemporary jazz. Hailing from Kobe, Japan, this New York-based trumpet ace has the chops but his main pursuit is the rare, creative groove, a sort of fusion that seems targeted for a hipper crowd with way too many sophisticated chord patterns and overall edginess to tag this as ‘smooth jazz.’
Up to now, Kuroda has made five albums, music that shares a lot of common ground with other groove-minded, hip-hop aware trumpet players like Erik Truffaz, Theo Croker, and Warner Bros.-era Miles Davis. But with Fly Moon Die Soon (coming out September 18, 2020 by First Word Records) there’s quite a bit of Thundercat added into his musical development. That’s because in addition to the trumpet, Kuroda is making much use of another instrument: the studio.
The heavily edited but heavily creative Fly Moon Die Soon ushers in a new era for the forward-thinking trumpet player from Japan. The tight, tidy handmade hip-hop grooves of the José James-produced Rising Son and the last album Zigzagger have given way to programmed and pre-processed sounds. You wouldn’t notice the shift in strategy looking at the credits; Zigzagger sidemen like Corey King, Takeshi Ohbayashi, Rashaan Carter, Adam Jackson and Keita Ogawa are all carried over. The difference is that they’re not playing together at the same time, as Kuroda changed up his production approach and went heavier on samples, beats, loops and the like, bringing in his musical partners to retain that improvisational and conspiratorial spirit that gives these layers R&B, hip-hop, funk a bedrock of jazz.
And, there’s more vocal than before, too; even Kuroda himself gets involved with that.
The billowing horns open up “Fade” and trombonist King is here to sing over this floating riff that explodes into a groove. But Kuroda also devised a four-piece horn chart near the end (with King, Craig Hill and Tomoaki Baba) that’s bop all the way and fits right inside all this modernity.
“ABC” has an Afro-beat underpinning partly thanks to Saotoshi Yoshida’s scratchy guitar and Adam Jackson’s galloping beats, as Kuroda pairs up with Hill’s sax for sinewy lead lines before Kuroda launches into a sassy, electrified trumpet solo. “Change” (video above) is King on vocals (but not trombone), marked by Kuroda’s intriguing and delightful chord changes.
A piano riff continuously looped forms the basis for “Do No Why,” a song Kuroda constructed essentially on his own, then brought in King to pair with on the horn charts and Jackson to supplement the beats with real drums. Kuroda builds the title song in much the same way, except that the horn setup adds his flugelhorn, a touch that results in a deeper, richer tone.
Herbie Hancock’s “Tell Me A Bedtime Story” is almost totally reconfigured, with shifty rhythms, a mixture of fuzzy vintage and sleek modern keyboards and a few chords slyly swapped out. It’s Kuroda’s flugelhorn that ultimately takes the center stage, however. While on the subject of Hancock, “Moody” sounds like something out of Thrust, and Ohbayashi’s keys jams like Herbie.
A cover by legendary funk outfit The Ohio Players is ironically the jazziest cut of this album, but “Sweet Sticky Thing” was like that on the original and this rendition, led by Alina Engibaryn handling the lyrics, is also the one that was — or could have been — live tracked by the band. Even in a studio-based record, a wholly organic creation once in while can’t hurt.
Takuya Kuroda had already located that sweet spot where funk, jazz, hip-hop and R&B intersect, but by amping up the studio creativity, he made that spot even sweeter with Fly Moon Die Soon. If fresh, contemporary jazz is your thing, Kuroda is an artist to pay close attention to.
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