Yumi Kurosawa is one of the top players of the Japanese koto, the winner of several competitions on the instrument. She moved to New York in 2002, and since then, her music has often incorporated non-Japanese influences. The 2023 release Metamorphosis offers new thinking along these lines, and it is quite an accomplishment. For the first time, Kurosawa appears with a trio, with herself on 20-string koto, Naho Parrini on violin, and Eric Phinney on percussion. The contrast between the percussive sounds of Kurosawa and Phinney and the melodic violin is fundamental to the sound here, but it breaks down further than that. Phinney features an Indian tabla prominently, and this comes into contrast with the Latin percussion of guest Carlos Maldonado, quite active in the final "Departure," a piece depicting an autumn festival in Kurosawas hometown. A second guest is Zac Zinger, who plays shakuhachi and an alto saxophone that offers a cadenza-like passage toward the end of "Restless Daydream," the longest piece on the album at just under eight minutes. All these strands are woven into the basic structures heard from Kurosawas koto, quite virtuosic in many places. Most of the pieces gather in intensity as they proceed and hold together kaleidoscopically as they approach a climax. There is one solo koto piece, "Inner Space." Far from being the usual kind of international release in which an exotic instrument is pasted onto homogeneous New Age textures, this is chamber music of a very high order. ~ James Manheim

Rovi