Takuya Kuroda - Everyday

 Kobe-born, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Takuya Kuroda’s eight studio album, ‘Everyday’, is a stunning demonstration of his dedication and skill. Since the release of his soulful seventh album, 2022’s ‘Midnight Crisp’ - a record praised by PopMatters as a “future classic” - Kuroda has not missed a beat. In his desire to achieve the ‘perfect blend of production and organic performance’, the 45-year-old musician has continued to throw himself into his practice daily, nearly thirty years into his musical life.
 ‘Everyday’ builds on and dives ever deeper into the hip-hop and neo-soul elements of Takuya’s previous work - it is a triumph of genre-blending modern jazz. Kuroda’s playing is sure-footed and pure, whether on the horn, synth, or Rhodes, and he virtuosically dances among infectious rhythms of his own creation.
 Kuroda’s twenty-one years in the United States have been fruitful. After studying composition at The New School, he began performing with DJ Premier’s Badder Band, Jose James and Akoya Afrobeat, and has recorded as a sideman and bandleader for records on the likes of Blue Note and Concord. But as Kuroda himself says, “the only way to make the music that I want to make is to work hard, every day.” And so we have ‘Everyday’, a title which reflects, as Kuroda puts it, “that simple message.”
 There is a certain duality to the title that taps into something profound about this music. ‘Everyday’ of course means both daily and commonplace. While Kuroda’s music is anything but average, there is something about the intrinsic and embedded nature of the day-to-day, the incidental rhythms of life, that is reflected and seductively expounded on here. Kuroda describes the process of recording ‘Everyday’ like this: “Make tracks at home, bring them to the studio, add or replace sounds, invite musicians, repeat the process to polish the track - as I hear it.” There is both a no-nonsense work ethic here and also a sort of embeddedness, an everydayness, that Kuroda achieves through this practice which perhaps cannot be accessed if one simply waits to get to the studio to begin work. Kuroda builds, tweaks, plays and polishes until what’s coming through the speakers matches what’s been playing in his head everyday. This is exactly what ensures Kuroda’s skilful synthesis of influences which Dean Van Nguyen noted while reviewing 2020’s ‘Fly Moon Die Soon’ for Pitchfork. One is left with that sense that Kuroda has been tapping it all out everywhere he goes, drumming his fingers on the diner counter, shuffling his feet along the pathway in the park, manifesting the rhythms of his mind. ‘Groove,’ Kuroda says, ‘is the foundation for all the tracks on ‘Everyday’.’