When I started playing the saxophone I searched out Youtube clips of some of my jazz heroes from way back in the 60s and 70s. But as much as I loved them, they didn't speak to what I wanted to achieve. One that did speak to me was Cannonball Adderley. So in that fortuitous way of the internet, Youtube offered me a video of Black Wax playing Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. It was something I wanted to play, and was played in a way I wanted to play it.
Black Wax hail from Miyakojima, a small island that's about as far as you can get from Tokyo and still be Japan. The band members are the Ikemura sisters (Marino on Saxophones and Ayano on keyboards), Tetsuya "88" Ogino on bass and Mikio Okuhira on drums. They play funky reggae and bossa nova versions of classic standards along with some of their own compositions and jazzed-up versions of traditional Miyakojima folk music.
Vigor is Black Wax's fourth album and all these elements are there. The band seamlessly weave their own numbers between Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca and A Night in Tunisia, plus Bobby Hebb's Sunny and Jackie Mittoo's Drum Song. Then they hit you with the traditional Agaizato - an arrangement that is so full of love for their island home, it brought tears to my eyes. I think it was John Coltrane who once said that Sonny Rollins could take any tune and make it his own. Black Wax seem to have this talent.
There are about 30 Youtube videos of the band out there - you can track their progress from being a bunch of talented young people in 2011 to today's formidable ensemble. As a starter, here's a link to their newly established Youtube channel, which includes a trailer for this album. And if you want to buy it, I've found CDJapan to be a pretty quick and reasonably-priced supplier.
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