A creativity hurricane of jazzy, twisted math pop, not just for the highly gifted.
Chicago offers a home to a select and friendly group of highly gifted music students who play 93 instruments, including the sensational NNAMDÏ, the jazzy Man without a Hat and the hyperactive Sen Morimoto. Together they run the A-student label Sooper, the platform for all of their releases. And although Kyoto-born Morimoto learned to play the saxophone from soul legend Charles Neville, he doesn’t brag about it on his third album DIAGNOSIS.
He only takes it out of the closet sporadically, such as in the album closer “Reality,” and sounds like a jazzy, winding Thundercat. Yes, the basic understanding of the album comes from jazz, but there is also quirky math pop, a bit of rap, a bit of guitar fiddling, always with jazzy harmonies that arise from unusual chord progressions stacked in layers. But Morimoto can also do delicate pop, like “Naive,” which was almost tamed into an acoustic track.
The musician calls his first two albums introspective, on this one he wants to show us the world. What motivated him to become more complex: He creates something twisted and new. The circle of recipients for such designs is limited, but creativity hurricanes like DIAGNOSIS should whiz around your ears more often.
Author: Michael Prenner