20. Kung-Fu World Champion – Hiromi
One of my favourite musical discoveries of the past few years is Japanese pianist/keyboardist Hiromi Uehara. Great player, and really great composer.

I suppose what I really like about her — apart from the sheer virtuosity of what she does — is the fact that she’s doing something that seems genuinely new in the area of fusion — a territory most players think is too well-trod to find anything else of interest.

She’s been mentored for some time now by jazz legend Ahmad Jamal, who clearly knows a good thing when he hears it.

Kung-Fu World Champion is a good intro to her work. The opening track to the second of her three Telarc releases to date, it shows her compositional approach: this is no traditional head-solos-head structure, but a completely written work that allows for improvisation within a strict form.

It also ramps up to lightspeed about halfway through. The first time I heard this track my jaw hit the floor.

I had the good fortune to see her play this live at the Birmingham Jazz Festival a year or so back… along with about a dozen other punters. I suspect I was the only person in the room that owned any of her albums.

I went to the gig with the jazz reviewer for the Birmingham Mail, who had “heard good things”, but hadn’t encountered her music as yet.

She blew the roof off. It was kind of like this — same band as shown below, but a much smaller venue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okWg_6mhxWY

If you want a whole album of Hiromi’s music, then I suggest you buy Brain. Her first, Another Mind is also excellent, though I’m a little less taken with Spiral — and in that respect I seem to be alone. Everybody loves it — even the non-jazzers.

Don’t get me wrong — as contemporary jazz trio albums go, it’s one of the best around. It’s just overshadowed a little by how insanely great the other two are — so start with those first.