Surprisingly Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, drummer for Emergency!, was not able to perform outside Japan except at this 2006 date in Denmark. The quartet also features guitarists Otomo Yashihide, Ryoichi Saito and bassist Hiroaki Mikutani. They cover jazz compass in the exact same way as 1990s Downtown bands Rootless Cosmopolitans, Junk Genius, and that is, sometimes they reimagine classics by Duke Ellington and Burt Bacharach in a completely new dialect. Otomo Yoshihide’s reconfiguration of Eric Dolphy’s classic recording may be familiar to many. Yoshigaki also covered Albert Ayler with Bells (Doubt Music 2010). Unlike some Downtown artists, the group’s rocked-out two-guitar/bass/drums jazz is presented without pretension. These aren’t artists trying to be ironic… allaboutjazz
