Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band - Stone Stone Stone (2022)

This album, the first under the band's name in six and a half years, is a jazz alternative album with a multilingual and hardcore taste that differs greatly from previous albums.
The recording for this album started in June 2020, during a period when many of our activities were being cancelled due to COVID-19. It had been a while since I last met or played with the members of this band, with whom prior to the pandemic I would regularly get together for gigs at various venues or travel around the country every summer to perform at regional festivals. I also asked friends who lived far away to remotely take part in this project. I called upon everyone, of course, because I wanted to make music with them, but also as a way to just stay in touch. The project began at a time when I desperately missed being around my friends and colleagues. On both a conscious and unconscious level, the compositions, mixing, and the overall album structure reflect on what was happening around us in Japan and in the rest of the world during this time. An underlying theme for this album was, “How can we respond to global events that we see on the news with an urgency as if they were happening nearby?” I wanted the distribution of this album and how its profits were split to also address these same issues, which motivated me to release it on my new label, Little Stone Records.
-- Otomo Yoshihide