Ryo Fukui – My Favorite Tune
Label: We Release Jazz – WRJ011LTD
Format: Vinyl, LP
Country: Switzerland
Released: Sep 16, 2021
Genre: Jazz
Style: Bop

On two consecutive nights in June of 1994, Fukui, one of the great jazz pianists of the 20th century, performed at Lutheran Hall in Sapporo, Hokkaido. The recording became an album called My Favorite Tune. But it quickly went out of print. Copies disappeared. Soon the album simply didn’t exist any more. Vanished in the wind.

It was lost for nearly twenty years. But My Favorite Tune is an album that seems to have predicted its own ephemeral nature, with self-conscious longing–each track seems to lament the passing of the previous. It’s easy to imagine a long, cool summer night in Sapporo, a middle-aged Fukui, mustache, goatee and large metal glasses, on a grand piano, tinkling mournfully away as the night and times grow darker.

There is only a piano. Fukui is silent and there is no hint of an audience. An album that has gone missing for so long can’t help but to generate a mystique for the contemporary listener. Listening to an album gone for so long can sound like the ghost of Fukui plays the piano in a dream bubble, a white cloud alone in a neverending sky, part of a different world.

The album features eight tracks that rush from the charming and delightful to the mournful, to sophisticated contemplation, to breathless excitement and bluesy groaning and jazz standard jump and a final song that is truly the sound of the words “goodbye.” You’ll want to smile and skip, you’ll want to bend over and cry, you’ll want to wag your hat and scream–it’s one piano album absolutely chock full of emotion and spirit, not to mention technical skill.