Miyuki Moriya opens her third Fumio Itabashi session to a second horn

The first edition took place at Pit Inn on November 4, 2023: Moriya on alto, Itabashi on piano, Yusuke Senboku on bass and Tsukada on drums. The venue’s announcement described a range from heat to lyrical melody, but the durable fact is the instrumentation—one horn against a complete piano trio. That format gave Moriya and Itabashi direct access to each other while bass and drums could either stabilize or provoke the exchange. [6]

For the March 12, 2025 return, billed explicitly as “vol. 2,” Takashi Sugawa replaced Senboku and Tsukada stayed. Pit Inn called it a re-performance and emphasized a band spanning generations. The alteration was therefore inside the rhythm section rather than at the front: the alto-piano relationship remained the visual and registral center while the low end acquired a different voice. [7]

Moriya’s June 2026 announcement calls the August concert the third time and prints the complete new lineup. The numbered history matters because the change can be stated precisely: Ishii creates the first second-horn chair; Seo becomes the third bassist in three editions; Tsukada is the continuing drummer. The “special session” label is not evidence of an unprecedented meeting, nor should it be. Its interest lies in watching a leader revise a working proposition in public. [4][1][6][7]

Moriya’s recent leader records establish two complementary instincts. The 2024 album Beyond the Sea is a five-piece studio set built largely from her originals, with veteran tenor saxophonist Kosuke Mine as guest; its credits place alto and tenor together over piano, bass and drums. Her next release, DUO Live at AKETA, goes in the opposite direction: six performances from two nights at Aketa no Mise, split between duos with pianist Mikiko Nagatake and drummer Tamaya Honda. [13][11]

That duo album is also a compact map of Japanese jazz composition. Its program includes pieces credited to Aketagawa Shoji, Koichi Matsukaze, Yosuke Yamashita and Itabashi, alongside Moriya’s own music and improvisation. The closing track, “FOR YOU,” is especially relevant here: YouTube’s label-supplied credits name Itabashi as composer, but the performance is only Moriya and Honda. There is no piano and Itabashi does not play on the recording. [11][12]

That absence makes the performance more useful than a generic biography. Moriya must make the alto carry enough melodic identity for the composition to remain itself while Honda supplies pulse, interruption, resonance and space without harmonic padding. Listen to where the saxophone lets a note widen rather than filling every beat, and to how the drums can answer a phrase without turning into accompaniment. When Itabashi is physically at the piano on August 17, the composition-and-interpreter relationship can become a live conversation rather than a cover at a distance. [12][11][1]

Itabashi’s official chronology begins with hearing his senior Takehiro Honda while studying at Kunitachi College of Music, then follows a 1970 professional debut with Sadao Watanabe, work with Terumasa Hino and Takeo Moriyama, and international touring with Elvin Jones’s Jazz Machine. Those names locate him historically, but his own biography’s recurring questions—what jazz, improvisation and composition are—better explain why musicians continue to build new contexts around his writing. [14][15]

“Watarase” is the clearest listening path. Nippon Columbia documents an October 12–13, 1981 Tokyo session for the seven-track album that was issued in 1982 and later reissued on CD. In 2026, P-Vine returned to a different branch of the piece: its July release notice documents the first complete issue of the forty-two-minute Symphonic Poem “Watarase,” recorded with the Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra, folk singer Yuki Kaneko and conductor Kazuhiko Komatsu in 2001. [16][14][17][18]

A tune that can function as a solo statement, a song with voice and a symphonic poem is not defined by one authorized size. The official Days of Delight film of Itabashi alone at Taro Okamoto’s piano makes that elasticity visible: melody arrives amid struck clusters, ringing decay and changes of physical pressure. It would be irresponsible to promise “Watarase” at Pit Inn—the program is unpublished—but entirely reasonable to listen for the same ability to let melody survive radical changes of density. [19][17][1]

The three special sessions are only one strand of their shared stage history. A 2024 Pit Inn bassless quartet put Moriya and Itabashi with Mine and Tamaya Honda, explicitly asking what that unusually exposed four-person design could discover. In April 2026, Moriya joined trumpeter Shinpei Ruike as a special guest on the final night of Itabashi’s seventy-seventh-birthday series, where Seo and drummer Kai Ogimi formed the pianist’s trio. [9][8]

The calendar around August 17 makes the network even clearer. Six days after Moriya’s session, Pit Inn lists both Moriya and Itabashi in the Takehiro Honda Tribute Band led by Tamaya Honda, alongside Mine, Satoshi Izumi and Yasushi Yoneki. Itabashi’s biography identifies hearing Takehiro Honda as the encounter that opened jazz for him; in the tribute group, he and Moriya are not leader and featured guest but participants in a repertory and lineage held collectively. [10][14][25]

This distinction keeps the feature honest. August 17 is not presented as the first or only time Moriya and Itabashi have shared a bandstand. It is Moriya’s own recurring laboratory inside a much denser history of quartets, tribute work and guest appearances. Because the pair already have shared language, the meaningful unknown is what Ishii, Seo and Tsukada cause them to do differently. [6][7][8][10][1]

Ishii is billed on tenor saxophone, but that is not the limit of the younger musician’s practice. Brilliant Works identifies Ishii as a keyboardist, saxophonist, composer and arranger who began classical piano at four, jazz piano at ten and alto saxophone at twelve. The 2022 debut My Place was a solo-piano album released when Ishii was twenty; contemporary release notes also identify tenor and alto as working instruments. [20][21][1]

That background makes the added horn more than a thicker front line. A player who understands the keyboard from inside can hear where Itabashi is placing harmony, register and attack even while answering on tenor. Moriya’s alto and Ishii’s tenor can separate by timbre and range, but they can also behave like two hands of an invented instrument—one stating, one shadowing, both clearing space for the actual piano. [20][1][14]

Those are listening possibilities, not claims about arrangements no source has published. Notice whether the horns enter together or independently; whether one accompanies the other with a short figure; whether the piano completes a horn phrase or breaks it open. Also listen for what happens after one horn stops. The quintet’s most consequential moments may come from subtraction, when five available voices choose to become two or three. [1][4]

Seo arrives with the deepest documented Itabashi ensemble history in this edition. His official biography lists both FIT! and the Fumio Itabashi Orchestra, as well as tours with the pianist. It also describes the physical basis of his own sound: gut strings, a thick and highly inflected pizzicato voice, and arco playing built around harmonics. In a two-horn quintet, that range lets bass function as ground, counterline or a third sustained wind-like color. [22][25]

The newly released Days of Delight performance is a precise preview of chemistry, not repertoire. Recorded May 26, 2026, it joins Itabashi, alto saxophonist Masayo Koketsu and Seo for 13:51 of credited free improvisation. Watch Seo’s choices when piano and alto become dense: he can add force, but he can also change register, bow a long tone or leave a gap that reorganizes the trio. Koketsu is not Moriya and the August band has two additional players, so the film should sharpen questions rather than predict outcomes. [23][22]

Tsukada supplies a different kind of continuity. He played the 2023 and 2025 special sessions and returns for the third. His official biography documents a 2022 graduation from Showa University of Music, study across jazz, classical and Latin percussion, and work in multiple contemporary groups. Seo knows Itabashi’s established ensembles; Tsukada knows the internal history of Moriya’s series. Their rhythm partnership joins those two memories for the first time in this named project. [6][7][24][1]

Start with “FOR YOU.” It is the most direct bridge from Moriya to Itabashi’s writing, yet the composer’s piano is absent. Follow the alto’s long arc across Honda’s drums and ask what information remains essential: interval, contour, breath, cadence or simply emotional direction. The track demonstrates that Moriya’s relationship to Itabashi can be compositional even when it is not an onstage collaboration. [12][11]

Then hear Itabashi alone in the 2026 Days of Delight “Watarase.” The official description identifies the piece, performer, recording date and Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum setting. Listen beyond volume: repeated figures alter under touch, silence changes the scale of the next attack, and the tune’s identity can reappear after passages that seem to have left it behind. That is a useful model for hearing how his piano may converse with written melody without merely harmonizing it. [19][16]

Finish with the Itabashi–Koketsu–Seo free improvisation. It removes composition as a declared map and shows the pianist and bassist negotiating form in real time with an alto voice. On August 17, add Moriya’s leadership, Ishii’s tenor and Tsukada’s drums to that question. What remains known is personnel and history; what remains open is the balance among theme, free space and pulse after downbeat. [23][22][1]

Shinjuku Pit Inn lists doors at 7 p.m. and music at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, August 17. Admission is ¥3,850 including one drink. The venue accepts web, counter and telephone reservations, gives reserved patrons priority entry at opening and closes reservations the previous day. The basement room is at Accord Shinjuku B1, 2-12-4 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo. [1][3]

The second set is also listed on Pit Inn Net Jazz. The current page shows an approximate 8:45 p.m. JST stream start, access through the ¥1,100 monthly unlimited plan and an archive window ending September 17. The event page says Pit Inn will announce the approximate live start on its X account that day. Treat all stream timing and availability as current information to recheck, not a permanent promise. [1][2]

The evening’s value does not depend on a ceremonial claim. Moriya has invited Itabashi before; they will share Pit Inn again six nights later. What makes this date distinct is the revision she has chosen for her own series: a tenor beside her alto, Itabashi’s regular bassist below them and the drummer who remembers both earlier attempts. The third conversation matters because it refuses to use the same grammar twice. [4][1][10][6][7]