Greetings and salutations Hivers. Today let's go into another Evening Groove / Three Tune Tuesday post.

As always, thanks to @ablaze for making this series. Lots of people participate in it! Follow the tags to find a ton of good music recommendation.

Today we're going to stick with Japanese Jazz, as I've been covering for the past few weeks. Last week I covered some jazz that harkened back to the earliest jazz of the 1920s-30s era. This week we're going to jump back to the present and cover a fusion jazz group.

The group goes by the name Jazztronik and covers genres ranging from jazz to rap to house and often mixes all of them. The group started as Ryota Nozak, a Japanese DJ who combined Japanese jazz and house. He is still at the center of it and is Jazztronik, but it has grown from there to include a number of people. The group has been growing in popularity since their founding in 1998 and is now one of the more popular Japanese groups playing today.

Here is the official YouTube page. Funny, their profile banner reminds me of @stickupboys' gifs that we all love. (It's the cover of one of their albums too)

I don't love Jazztronik as I have loved some of the other Japanese Jazz artists I've covered, but I do find myself wanting to play them sometimes. Let's cover three of the more infectious songs in their catalog.

[Warning: Their label seems very strict about video permissions. I'm trying to find videos that can be embedded and can be watched outside of Japan (I test that by setting my VPN to various countries) but I'm getting very inconsistent results, even when using videos from the official account. Under each embed I'll put a direct link just in case the embed doesn't work. If the direct link also doesn't work, search the group name and song and you will find many others]

Samurai (2022 Version)

This isn't their best by my ears, but many people disagree and really love this one. It is a bit of a fusion of everything. The one consistency is a nice piano that ties it all together. It is a very catchy song! The original was released in 2004, but here is an updated version they did in 2022.

Direct link

Mista Swing (Club Mix)

This is similar to the above, but different. There is a nice flute throughout.

Direct Link

Move

Changing focus from the two high energy jazz techno songs above, this is a really nice piano piece. It starts in a somewhat meandering way, but keeps building the theme in a really pleasant way.

Direct link

Bonus Song: Nanairo

The song title (七色) means "seven colors".

This feels very much like an anime song. I'm not going to translate the lyrics for you, but it's pretty positive, feel-good song (here are the lyrics on Shazam but you don't need to understand them to enjoy it). The singer is wonderful (she goes by the name Mye) and the background music is very good. See what you think.

Direct Link

So what do you think? Good? Bad? Just ok? As always, if you like any of these, just do a YouTube search for more. Like I said at the top of this post, Jazztronik is pretty popular today so there are tops of uploads of their stuff to keep you busy.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.