Everyday

Kobe-born, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Takuya Kuroda's eight studio album, Everyday is a stunning demonstration of his dedication and skill. Since the release of his soulful seventh album, 2022's Midnight Crisp - a record praised by PopMatters as a "future classic" - Kuroda has not missed a beat. In his desire to achieve the "perfect blend of production and organic performance" the 45-year-old musician has continued to throw himself into his practice daily, nearly thirty years into his musical life. Everyday builds on and dives ever deeper into the hip hop and neo-soul elements of his previous work. It is a triumph of genre-blending modern jazz. Kuroda's playing is sure-footed and pure - whether on the horn, synth, or Rhodes- and he virtuosically dances among infectious rhythms of his own creation. Kuroda's twenty-one years in the United States have been fruitful. After studying composition at The New School, he began performing with DJ Premier's Badder Band, Jose James and Akoya Afrobeat, and has recorded as a sideman and bandleader for records on the likes of Blue Note and Concord. But as Kuroda himself says, "the only way to make the music that I want to make is to work hard, every day." And so we have Everyday, a title which reflects, as Kuroda puts it, "that simple message." There is a certain duality to the title that taps into something profound about this music. "Everyday" of course means both daily and commonplace. While Kuroda's music is anything but average, there is something about the intrinsic and embedded nature of the day-to-day, the incidental rhythms of life, that is reflected and seductively expounded on here. Kuroda describes the process of recording Everyday like this: "Make tracks at home, bring them to the studio, add or replace sounds, invite musicians, repeat the process to Polish the track - as I hear it."

There is both a no-nonsense work ethic here and also a sort of embeddedness, an everydayness, that Kuroda achieves through this practice which perhaps cannot be accessed if one simply waits to get to the studio to begin work. Kuroda builds, tweaks, plays and polishes until what's coming through the speakers matches what's been playing in his head everyday. This is exactly what ensures Kuroda's skillful synthesis of influences which Dean Van Nguyen noted while reviewing 2020's Fly Moon Die Soon for Pitchfork. One is left with that sense that Kuroda has been tapping it all out everywhere he goes, drumming his fingers on the diner counter, shuffling his feet along the pathway in the park, manifesting the rhythms of his mind. "Groove," Kuroda says, "is the foundation for all the tracks on Everyday." And atop that strong foundation, brought to life by the energy of David Frazier's drumming, Kuroda's shimmering lyricism dances all over Everyday. His trumpet playing pops and weaves and rings on the title track and his melodies are, as he puts it, "singable" - profoundly so on the album closer, "Curiosity," on which Kuroda trades trumpet for flugelhorn.

Before that, "Bad Bye" is a glittering and classic sounding neo soul effort, featuring a stunning performance from vocalist FiJA. It's as though Kuroda plucked this track from a dream of Mama's Gun - but, unmistakably, it's Kuroda's dream and so the song is Kuroda's, entirely. Likewise with "Iron Giraffe," in which Kuroda makes space for tenor saxophonist Craig Hill to weave a contemporary reverie of Night Music. Everyday is hyperaware of a panoply of old ideas and a pantheon of old gods but as Kuroda engages these tropes and personalities day in and day out, he turns it all around in a style that's undeniably cool and personal. As Pitchfork put it, "Kuroda's skill is not drawing influence from so many different forms, it's radiating joy in doing so." And as Kuroda puts it, "I'm still learning everyday and trying to express myself more clearly in the form of music that I love.