20-String Koto Sorceress Yumi Kurosawa Brings Her Flickering Magic to Joe’s Pub

Yumi Kurosawa got her start as a national champion koto player in her native Japan. But she hardly limits herself to traditional Japanese sounds. On her latest album Metamorphosis – which isn’t online yet – she expands her signature style, cross-pollinating with other traditions from around the globe. The result is individualistic to the nth degree and often unselfconsciously gorgeous: this is one of the most beautiful albums of 2023 so far. She’s playing the album release show on March 30 at 7 PM at Joe’s Pub; cover is $25/$15 stud.

Here’s what it sounds like. She and the band launch into a brisk, verdant sway in the opening track, Oneday Monday, violinist Naho Parrini sailing over Kurosawa’s spiky, intricate phrasing, which sometimes resembles a harp, other times a banjo. Her flashy glissandos and cascades make a contrast with the undulating groove from Eric Phinney’s tabla. There’s a tantalizingly brief violin-koto duel before they wind it up.

She and her trio follow a suspensefully cantering pace in track two, aptly titled Journey, with more of a traditional pentatonic folk atmosphere spiced with stark violin and delicately dancing tabla, down to an elegant Britfolk-tinged waltz. By contrast, Dawn is a slow, stately processional in 6/8 time, with wistful violin over Kurosawa’s intricately churning lines. As it winds out, she moves to a more incisive rhythm while Parrini reaches to an angst-fueled peak.

The album’s big epic is Restless Daydream: first Kurosawa and Parrini follow a similar stark/resonant dynamic, then the boomy percussion kicks in, violin and and koto building a kaleidoscopic interweave. Guest alto saxophonist Zac Zinger and then Parrini add thoughtful solos: the way she blasts out of a misterioso Kurosawa break as the group reach liftoff will give you goosebumps.

The terrain changes just as vividly in New Land Found, the group shifting from a catchy, anthemic intro to a rising and falling, bracingly tense theme and then a graceful waltz. Likewise, they move from an insistent, martial pulse to more airy textures in Zealla.

Mystical, lingering passages interchange with adrenalizing climbs and flurries throughout the next track, Mandala. While Inner Space is the only solo koto piece here, it’s arguably the high point of the album: Kurosawa is a one-woman orchestra with her thickets of circling, wavelike phrases underpinning an incisive melody that she drives to a slashing crescendo, and then gracefully downward. The band wind their way from a wistful mashup of Japanese folk and a rock ballad to a boisterously shuffling theme bookending a boomy percussion solo in the album’s final cut, Departure.