Emi Makabe’s Fearless Individualistic Debut Album Blends Jazz, Japanese Folk and the Tropics

The first time anybody from this blog was in the house at an Emi Makabe show, it was a rapt, often otherworldly, early midweek gig in the fall of 2017 at 55 Bar in the West Village. That evening she mixed up vocal and instrumental numbers, joined by Vitor Goncalves on accordion, Thomas Morgan (fresh off Bill Frisell tour) on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums.

Fast forward to 2020: the bar is closed, but Makabe has just released her debut album, Anniversary, a similarly magical, fearlessly individualistic blend of jazz, Japanese folk music and tropicalia streaming at youtube. Makabe is a singer whose axe is the shamisen, a lute with a somewhat banjo-like timbre which is ubiquitous in Japan but not particularly well known here. If all goes well it will be more familiar to American jazz fans by the time she makes her next album…or plays 55 Bar again, assuming it survives.

Back to the music. The album’s first track is Treeing, a briskly surreal but verdant bossa nova tune which Makabe introduces with spiky shamisen, Goncalves’ piano following an incisive upward drive

Her expressive mezzo-soprano shifts from a resonant presence to soaring intensity in the aptly titled Joy, Goncalves’ bristling lines matched by Morgan’s bubbling pulse and Wollesen’s colorful, counterintuitive cymbals: at this point in his career, he might have the most interesting plates in all of jazz.

Chimney Sweeper, a setting of a William Blake poem about a homeless boy, engages the bass and drums just a hair ahead or behind the piano, and vice versa, a neat effect: Makabe’s point seems to be that we naturallly reach out to the less fortunate, no matter what century we’re in.

Makabe breaks out the shamisen again for Moon & I – an original, not the Karla Rose psychedelic soul ballad – and hits a gorgeously nocturnal, dizzyingly polyrhythmic drive. Goncalves’ glittering upper-register modalities are literally out of this world.

The hazy, rubato-ish changes of Something Love offer tantalizing omens: the close-miking on Wollesen’s drums, in tandem with Morgan’s spare pulse and Goncalves’ lyricism pays off mightily. The spiky interweave of Makabe’s shamisen with the piano in the hypnotic yet anthemic Flash is texturally delicious, capped off with her disquietingly captivating vocalese.

I Saw the Light – another original, not the gospel standard – makes a great segue with Goncalves’ Lynchian modes and Makabe’s guardedly hopeful, ambered vocals over an increasingly busy rhythmic drive. Goncalves switches to accordion, Wollesen to vibes for Mielcke, a bittersweetly enveloping, tableau and one of the album’s high points.

Makabe returns to uneasy, rainswept, vividly bittersweet modes for O Street, a jazz waltz. She goes back to a lilting tropical milieu for the deceptively catchy, matter-of-fact Rino and closes the album with the plainspoken title track, her pensive vocals and Morgan’s churning bass bringing to mind the classic Sarah Vaughan/Joe Comfort duets of the early 60s.

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