Senri Oe - HOMEWORK (2026) Hi-Res

Senri Oe spent the 1980s and '90s as one of Japan's biggest pop stars, performing at the Nippon Budokan and winning a Gold Disc Award for his seventh album, 1234. At 47, he walked away from that career, moved to New York and enrolled in the New School's jazz program, and in 2012 self-released his first jazz record, Boys Mature Slow. The decade-plus since has been unusually prolific and varied: Answer July (2016) leaned into vocal jazz, Boys & Girls (2018) reworked his own pop catalog for solo piano, while Hmmm (2019) marked his first outing with a proper trio. Class of '88, released in 2023 to mark his 40th anniversary as a recording artist, expanded the Boys & Girls concept back out to trio format and revisited 1234 specifically, turning the record that made him a household name in Japan into something considerably stranger. Even with that catalog behind him, HOMEWORK may be the most formally restless thing he's made yet.

The record moves across 16 tracks between straightforward acoustic trio playing, solo piano pieces, and self-produced electronics, recorded partly at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn with longtime collaborators Matt Clohesy on bass and Ross Pederson on drums, and partly in Oe's own apartment. Oe has described the album as a soundtrack for a movie that doesn't exist, meant to let each listener supply their own images. That description tracks: "Stormy Day" sits comfortably within conventional piano-trio jazz, while other tracks—like two distinct versions of the glitchy, jazzy "Amber Lab" or the drum-and-bass–indebted propulsion of "Homework"—fold in programmed textures and studio choices that owe more to his pop background than to any jazz lineage. That range could easily read as scattered, but Oe's touch at the piano—lush, patient, and highly melodic—holds the different modes together more than the sequencing does. Oe made HOMEWORK in the aftermath of losing his dachshund Peace, who traveled with him from Japan and was his companion through the entire process of rebuilding a career from scratch in a new country and a new genre; that loss resonates most in the spacious solo-piano material toward the back half of the album.

18 years into his second career, Oe isn't interested in easing longtime fans back into the fold or even doing much to appease jazz gatekeepers. Instead, HOMEWORK refuses to soften its stylistic detours for anyone expecting a nostalgia play or the sort of stuffy formalism that so many late-career forays into "jazz" often contort themselves into and instead confidently adds another fascinating scene to a unique second act.