Being Guided by the Light – Mamiko Watanabe

In Being Guided by the Light, Mamiko Watanabe finds a compass rose in tradition. Alongside Santi Debriano on double bass and Billy Hart on drums, the Japanese pianist builds a trio in which her own compositions coexist with pieces by John Hicks, Jimmy Rowles, Tadd Dameron, and McCoy Tyner, as if each offered a different way of understanding what remains to be discovered within the language of jazz.

The title track establishes that search from the outset. Watanabe’s piano moves with clarity and energy, while Debriano and Hart refuse to be reduced to accompaniment. The music rests on a three-way conversation, a dynamic that takes on another dimension in “The Scene Is Clean,” where Dameron’s composition opens space for a more incisive exchange and for Hart’s sense of time, capable of changing the temperature of the trio without disturbing its balance.

On “The Peacocks,” by Jimmy Rowles, the movement slows down and reveals another facet of her language. Watanabe allows the melody to retain its fragility, shaping the space with a sensitivity that contrasts with the force of “Atomic Space,” one of her two original compositions and the album’s most expansive territory. Here, her writing seems less interested in reaching a particular destination than in discovering how far an idea can be transformed once it passes through the hands of these three musicians.

This is an album in which tradition and exploration remain constantly intertwined. Watanabe does not attempt to resolve that relationship. Being Guided by the Light seems to begin from precisely the opposite idea: moving forward means accepting that there will always be something ahead of us that we have yet to know.