On my second night in Kyoto, I went to Candy Live Jazz in Gion to see the trio of Kotono Nishimura 西村琴乃 (alto and soprano sax), Yuka Yanagihara 柳原由佳 (piano), and Ayuko Ikeda 池田安友子(percussion). I was not familiar with any of them, but from the start, I found their set, inspired by the spring season, infectious, rhythmically adventurous, and uplifting.
At times, most notably during Kotono’s number “Milky Way” from her album “Favorable Move,” I felt as if I’d been transported to a landscape untarnished by humans, where dawn is breaking over mountains in a river-fed valley of verdant splendor where you can hear birds singing and take a breath, like in a Thomas Cole painting, a place where you can look up on a clear, moonless night and be awestruck by the majesty of the Milky Way, so far away and yet seemingly so close.
