Various

The third installment of J Jazz doesn’t just dig deep—it dives headfirst into Japan’s fertile jazz underground of the ’70s and ’80s, unearthing grooves that shimmer with cinematic tension and spiritual heat. Once again, compilers Tony Higgins and Mike Peden treat the archive like sacred ground, pulling together a suite of recordings that feel more like secret transmissions than mere reissues.

From the thunderous modal propulsion of Makoto Terashita’s piano lines to the velvet-edged melancholy of Tatsuya Nakamura’s ensemble work, Volume 3 channels a specific kind of energy—urban yet mystical, restless yet refined. You hear the influence of post-bop and fusion, but filtered through Japan’s sense of precision and poise; an aesthetic where rhythm becomes architecture and tone is treated like light through shoji paper.

Every track feels alive in the room: smoke curling, glasses clinking, a band on the edge of transcendence. It’s a document of musicians pushing the jazz language into new emotional dimensions—searching, spiraling, ecstatic.

J Jazz Volume 3 isn’t nostalgia—it’s revelation. A reminder that some of the deepest moments in global jazz history happened far from the Blue Note studios or Village Vanguard stages—buried instead in Tokyo basements and Osaka clubs, waiting for the needle to drop decades later.