SCENERY

Jazz...basically like all other piano jazz. 3/5

Great jazz music one I’ll try and come back to.

Nothing revolutionary for 1976, but nice to hear someone keeping jazz alive in Japan in the 70s.

Scenery pops up constantly on lists and recommendations, and it seems it almost has a status as a bit of a cult-classic. So now after it appeared on this list, I finally sat down with it properly, three listens in total, and I'll be honest, it didn't live up to the reputation for me.

I don't really understand all the fuss surrounding this album. The performances of the standards, in particular, are quite bland, fairly cliché and mostly reminded me of better versions elsewhere. Ryo Fukui is clearly technically skilled (especially as an auto-didact who'd only been playing for about 4 years), but his idea of conveying emotion often seems to be pounding on the keys as hard as possible, which gets tiring after about three minutes.

It's quite listenable overall, and the rendition of Early Summer is genuinely nice and makes up for some of it. Yoshinori Fukui on drums is amazing.
But the Autumn Leaves here is clumsy, and that's a song that's been played to death by better hands.

Enjoyable jazz. Early Summer was the standout track for me. Low four stars.

Chilled