Bellflower

Jun lida's sophomore album, Bellflower, revisits and extends flights of imagination sketched out earlier in his career. The title of this new EP evokes an image of the trumpet's bell as the flowering outgrowth of the "evergreen" plant of lida's own musicianship. (It is also the name of the street where lida's college jazz jam sessions took place.) A range of styles and preoccupations merge from the tracklist, unified by lida's bright tone and lilting style.

The dialogue with lida's preceding album, Evergreen, is made clear in the iconography of Bellflower's album cover. lida is once again seated for a portrait with his instrument. Here, however, he is split between performance and recognition.

For any jazz player, the act of listening is as much a part of one's performance as playing itself. The rich interplay between lida and his bandmates is a clear example of this. The sound world lida builds may feel intimate and small. In reality, he is working alongside a full room of collaborators. Giulio Xavier Cetto is on double bass and electric bass, providing cutting responses to lida's trumpet. Chris McCarthy on piano and Rhodes is able to give body and depth to the otherwise bright sounds of the tracks. All this is supported by the subtle machinery of Jongkuk Kim on drums. Masami Kuroki swings in with guitar. Takafumi Nikaido is on congas. And Zelda Harris provides force to the spoken word section of "Will They Remember?" Each member is a collaborator in the truest sense as lida put the majority of these songs together while touring with this band. The "writer's room" feel and conversational repartee of the tracks emerges in the seamless transitions between players.

lida's work here makes continual reference and reuse of important influences for him. These include jazz titans such as Roy Hargrove (pulling on licks from "Strasbourg / St. Denis" for lida's "Hota-ru Nights") and Yusef Lateef by way of Nujabes. The Nujabes homage on "The Final View" is part of lida's rich identification and translation of contemporary Japanese (American) cultural ideas into jazz idiom. Marco the Phoenix from the anime "One Piece" receives his own track.

In particular, Nujabes, pioneer-extraordinaire of highly referential, multi-genre compositions has been a major star in lida's constellation of inspirations. His transformations of these sources, however, are never repetitive or derivative. Rather, he refashions the material into his own voice, allowing it to shine anew.

It will be exciting to see how the trumpeter develops these ideas even further (or breaks from them in future releases). It is no easy task to define and re-define oneself in an age of hypersaturated media complexes that demand singularity. The Bellflower as a way of life regenerates each year without being exactly the same.