How does the well-taught, technically-sound pianist develop his or her voice?

Keith Jarrett reportedly took some inspiration from his brother Chris’s teenage assaults on the piano (‘I remember hearing him play some things that affected me greatly. They were highly charged – a direct product, he tells me, of his crises at the time. He threw himself at the keyboard’).

Meanwhile Brad Mehldau has worked wonders with limbic independence, odd-time vamps and unusual cover versions.

But the late Masabumi Kikuchi, probably best known for his work with Paul Motian and Gil Evans (and he briefly recorded with Miles Davis), perfected a kind of ‘Zen’ piano which eschewed vamps or grooves, though his playing was anything but repetitive or minimalist.

Always an original, he refused to blow one away with technique or ‘licks’, happy to play a simple triad in just the ‘right’ place (and a fine composer too – check out ‘M’ on Greg Osby’s Symbols Of Light album.)

And now Red Hook Records have released his Final Studio Recording Vol. II, a solo piano session recorded in New York two years before his death in 2015, and it’s another winner.

It’s a mixture of beloved standards and improvisations, or ‘instant ballads from another ballad’, as Ben Ratliff calls them in his excellent liner notes,

Every single track on the CD is a floating rubato, i.e. without a specific metre, and Kikuchi also
turns out to be a master of voice leading. ‘Manha de Carnaval’ is a good example – he finds a very unusual chord to accompany the last note of the opening melody line, and then probes it throughout.

Mehldau may have brought in a bass vamp during the B section, but Kikuchi lets a few chords hang in the air and then embark on a thoughtful solo without a wasted note.

So The Final Studio Session Vol. II is highly recommended and a fascinating listen. Those looking for original sounds should enlist here, and it also features a beautifully recorded piano, complete with audible pedal work and multiple overtones.