Ken Muramatsu

sketchbook’s soundtrack popped up on streaming services last month. this release makes it one of the additions to the small catalog of things you can now stream from ken muramatsu, a jazz pianist that has been active for forty years and has over fifty albums credited to his name. only tremendously recently, as in the last few months, has any of his music popped up for streaming on apple music or amazon music at all, and still missing a large bulk of his output. when I bring up the blackhole of japanese music rights, it’s not even necessarily to harp on my own pain in accessing the music — peer-to-peer solutions solve most problems that executives refuse to acknowledge even exist — but to highlight that so many extraordinary names are having their reach artificially limited and their influence discarded by totally aloof interests. it’s an indictment of the status quo that so many japanese releases have had new life breathed into them only by youtube recommendations uploaded by third parties, with full albums uploaded as videos that have been able to covertly escape copyright claims or publishers unaware that they even exist to begin with. this worked for casiopea, where mint jams has seen enough success that it has since been reissued three times on vinyl to keep up with demand on the secondhand market. the alternate dilemma is ken’s case, where every upload is either region locked or taken down swiftly by SMEJ so that it can do nothing other than wither away in obscurity. the silver lining now, at least, is that the sketchbook soundtrack happens to be one of ken’s best works.

ken’s music is a reverance for the lackadaisical rather than anything grander. while other greats like susumu hirasawa pipe the sounds of deep space through amigas, ken is rooted deeply in the ordinary, often using simple jazz trio instrumentation closely matched to vince guaraldi’s work on the peanuts specials. where vince and ken diverge is in their instrumentation, as ken often prefers to swap in more playful alternatives, like organs and ukeleles, that imbue a more lighthearted feeling than what vince accomplishes with his strict choices. that strength shines through most clearly on the soundtracks for sketchbook and umi monogatari, where his tracks enforce an ambience that disappear behind the scenes they decorate while still being rich when listened to in isolation. even where some tracks swell with bombast, or others retreat to a melancholoy, they all feel like perfect acoustic backdrops for cloudwatching against a bright blue sky. with the tracks from his independent albums, where the slap bass can sometimes be unchained, a pastel sunset seen from a coastal highway may be even more appropriate.