A Bittersweet Retrospective Showcasing Virtuosity Without Reinvention
By:Jan Vranken
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8/10)
UMG Recordings | Released October 17, 2025 | 17 tracks, 110 minutes
Two days after Japanese piano virtuoso Hiromi Uehara released Electrifying Piano on October 17, 2025, the jazz world lost one of its most visionary bassists. Anthony Jackson—the 73-year-old pioneer who revolutionized the electric bass by creating the modern six-string bass guitar—passed away on October 19 following a battle with Parkinson’s disease. This tragic timing casts Electrifying Piano in an unexpectedly elegiac light, transforming what appears to be a straightforward career retrospective into an inadvertent memorial for a musical partnership that helped define Hiromi’s most formidable period.
Released through UMG Recordings, this 110-minute, 17-track compilation draws from multiple eras of Hiromi’s prolific career, primarily spotlighting two distinct ensembles: her celebrated Trio Project featuring Jackson and drummer Simon Phillips, and her more recent electric quartet Sonicwonder, featuring trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, bassist Hadrien Feraud, and drummer Gene Coye. The result is a document that showcases jaw-dropping technical mastery and ferocious musicianship—but one that ultimately retreads familiar territory rather than charting new sonic landscapes.
THE CLASH OF TITANS: TWO APPROACHES TO VIRTUOSITY
The album opens with “Seeker,” a seven-and-a-half-minute tempest featuring the Trio Project. Hiromi’s piano attack is nothing short of extraterrestrial—cascading runs that would make Oscar Peterson nod in approval, shifting from delicate melodicism to percussive fury within a single measure. Jackson’s six-string bass guitar work provides an impossibly deep foundation, his pioneering instrument (tuned BEADGC rather than the standard four-string EADG) offering harmonic possibilities that simply don’t exist on a conventional bass. Phillips, meanwhile, navigates the complex terrain with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker having a nervous breakdown.
Here’s what separates the Trio Project from mere fusion exercises: Phillips and Jackson form a rhythm section that doesn’t just support—they construct the architectural foundation upon which Hiromi builds her most audacious post-bop constructions. Listen to how Phillips’ polyrhythmic subdivisions lock with Jackson’s low-register countermelodies on “Haze,” creating a gravitational field that allows Hiromi’s right hand to achieve escape velocity. This is the heavy artillery approach to jazz fusion, where the rhythm section does the seismic work, freeing the soloist to explore the stratosphere.
The immediate shift to “XYZ” featuring Sonicwonder reveals a fundamentally different aesthetic. Where the Trio Project operates as a three-way conversation among equals, Sonicwonder functions more as a melodic organism. French bassist Hadrien Feraud—whose Jaco Pastorius-influenced fluidity and harmonic sophistication make him the perfect foil for Hiromi’s compositional ambitions—doesn’t anchor so much as he weaves. His six-string work carries Jackson’s DNA in its extended range and contrapuntal thinking, but filtered through that singing, vocal quality Jaco brought to the instrument. It’s precisely the stylistic marriage Hiromi’s increasingly melodic Sonicwonder material demands, and watching him navigate these charts live, Feraud proves himself another magician in Hiromi’s ever-evolving stable of virtuosos.
But the real revelation in Sonicwonder is how melody takes center stage. O’Farrill’s trumpet and Hiromi’s keyboards engage in unison rallies that will leave audiences slack-jawed—those lockstep scalar runs on “Balloon Pop,” the octave-doubled themes in “XYZ” that sound impossible even as you’re hearing them executed flawlessly. This is where Sonicwonder distinguishes itself: not through rhythmic density, but through melodic architecture. The quartet’s strength lies in those breathtaking moments when horn and keys become a single polytimbral voice, pushing melodic ideas to their logical—and illogical—extremes.
BEETHOVEN MEETS BRAZIL
The album’s sequencing reveals both its strengths and weaknesses. Track five offers Hiromi’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8, “Pathétique,” with the Trio Project. It’s a fascinating exercise in genre collision—the classical gravitas meets jazz improvisation in a way that’s technically stunning but somewhat predictable for anyone who’s followed Hiromi’s career. She’s been doing this particular trick since the Trio Project’s 2011 debut Voice, and while the execution remains flawless, the concept no longer surprises. One wishes she’d tackle Bartók or Messiaen—composers whose harmonic language might genuinely challenge her improvisational reflexes rather than provide familiar terrain for her formidable technique.
More intriguing is “Dançando No Paraíso,” where Hiromi ventures into Brazilian-tinged territory. Here, finally, we hear her exploring different cultural vocabularies, though even this feels more like tourism than true integration. The piece is gorgeous—particularly in its middle section where the piano seems to float above invisible samba rhythms—but it doesn’t push the envelope in ways that her 2023 Sonicwonderland or 2025 Out There albums did with their video game-influenced compositions and genre-fluid experimentation.
THE SONICWONDER HIGHLIGHTS
“Pendulum,” featuring vocalist Michelle Willis alongside Sonicwonder, represents one of the compilation’s more interesting inclusions. Willis’s clear, expressive vocals provide a rare lyrical anchor in Hiromi’s typically instrumental universe. The track builds from intimate piano-vocal interplay to a full ensemble explosion, showcasing the quartet’s ability to expand and contract dynamic space with surgical precision. The arrangement recalls the melodic generosity of early Weather Report—that same willingness to let a beautiful theme breathe before deconstructing it.
“Balloon Pop” is pure joy—a six-minute exercise in staccato interplay where Hiromi’s left hand, Gene Coye’s drums, and Feraud’s bass create a rhythmic conversation of such intricate syncopation that it feels simultaneously mechanical and deeply human. When Feraud takes his solo around the four-minute mark, he channels both Jackson’s architectural thinking and Pastorius’s melodic gift, delivering lines that would be impossible for most bassists to even conceptualize, let alone execute. This is modern electric bass at its apex—harmonically sophisticated, rhythmically adventurous, and sung with the kind of vocal inflection that separates great bassists from mere technicians.
THE SOLO INTERLUDES
The compilation’s middle section offers glimpses of Hiromi’s solo piano work: “Green Tea Farm,” “Spectrum,” and “Blackbird” (the latter being her well-worn interpretation of the Beatles classic). These tracks feel almost meditative compared to the pyrotechnics surrounding them. “Spectrum,” drawn from her 2019 solo album of the same name, showcases her impressionistic side—minimalist patterns that ripple outward like Philip Glass meets Maurice Ravel, though one suspects Takemitsu lurks somewhere in her harmonic choices here.
“Blackbird” remains as intimate and personal as ever, though after countless performances spanning nearly two decades, one wishes she’d find new material to explore in this intimate setting. Keith Jarrett has his “My Song,” Brad Mehldau his “Wonderwall”—every pianist needs a signature ballad that speaks to their innermost voice. Hiromi has clearly chosen “Blackbird,” but the question remains whether it still reveals anything new about her artistry, or whether it’s become a comfortable calling card.
THE SONICBLOOM WILDCARD
Tracks eight and fifteen represent Hiromi’s earlier Sonicbloom project, which preceded Sonicwonder. “Time Out” (a Dave Brubeck reference that’s impossible to ignore) and “Caravan” (the eight-and-a-half-minute interpretation of Duke Ellington’s standard) feel slightly out of place sequencing-wise, but they serve as important bridges in understanding Hiromi’s evolution from the guitar-driven fusion of Sonicbloom to the horn-driven approach of Sonicwonder. On “Caravan,” Hiromi takes liberties with the harmonic structure that would make both Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie raise an eyebrow—whether in approval or confusion depends on your tolerance for reharmonization that borders on complete reimagining.
THE VERDICT: MASTERY WITHOUT MYSTERY
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Electrifying Piano is an album of almost superhuman technical achievement that ultimately offers little we haven’t heard from Hiromi before. The musicianship borders on the extraterrestrial—try following Hiromi’s left hand during “Voice,” the nine-minute Trio Project centerpiece that functions as the album’s emotional and technical apex, and you’ll quickly realize you’re witnessing something few humans can accomplish. Jackson’s six-string bass guitar work throughout these tracks (recorded between 2011-2016 for the Trio Project sessions) represents some of the most sophisticated electric bass playing in jazz history—lines that function simultaneously as bass, as harmony, as countermelody. Sonicwonder proves itself a formidable unit capable of genre-fluid improvisation and ensemble interplay that rivals the great fusion quartets.
But virtuosity alone doesn’t equal innovation. While contemporaries like Kamasi Washington are expanding jazz’s cosmic boundaries through orchestral maximalism, or artists like SML are integrating electronic and ambient textures in genuinely novel ways, Hiromi seems content to perfect what she’s already mastered. There’s no shame in that—few artists have pushed jazz piano technique to these stratospheric heights, and fewer still maintain such consistency across formats (solo, trio, quartet, orchestra). But for a musician who burst onto the scene in 2003 with Another Mind—a debut that genuinely did challenge genre classifications—Electrifying Piano feels more like consolidation than exploration.
The album works best as a career sampler for newcomers and a bittersweet memorial for longtime fans. Jackson’s passing just 48 hours after its release adds unintended emotional weight—these recordings of his six-string bass work with Hiromi now feel like messages from beyond, reminders of a partnership that helped push electric bass into uncharted territory. When you hear his deep, resonant lines anchoring “Desire” or providing the foundation for “Haze,” you’re hearing an instrument pioneer who expanded what was thought possible on electric bass, who proved that Jamerson’s melodic instincts could coexist with the extended range demanded by modern harmonic complexity.
THE FINAL NOTES
At 110 minutes, Electrifying Piano demands endurance and rewards attention. The sequencing between Trio Project’s rhythmic density and Sonicwonder’s melodic focus keeps things engaging, and individual tracks are uniformly excellent. The closing epic, “Old Castle, by the river, in the middle of a forest,” offers an eight-minute denouement that allows ears to cool down after the preceding intensity—a cinematic piece that suggests Hiromi’s film score work (notably for 2023’s Blue Giant) has influenced her compositional approach toward more narrative structures.
The production across various source albums (primarily 2011’s Voice, 2014’s Alive, 2023’s Sonicwonderland, and 2025’s Out There) remains consistently excellent, with Michael Bishop’s engineering on the Trio Project tracks particularly noteworthy for bringing piano, bass, and drums into sharp, room-filling presence without sacrificing dynamic range. The Sonicwonder tracks, recorded at Skywalker Sound, benefit from that facility’s acoustic design—there’s air around these instruments, space for the music to breathe.
Electrifying Piano earns its four-star rating through sheer force of technical brilliance and the undeniable chemistry between world-class musicians at the peak of their powers. But the missing fifth star represents the innovation gap—the sense that Hiromi is playing it safe, recycling her greatest hits rather than risking the unknown. For an artist whose early career was defined by fearless genre-blending and rhythmic complexity that left audiences breathless, this retrospective feels like a pause for breath rather than a leap forward.
Still, in a year where Anthony Jackson left us, having this document of his artistry with Hiromi feels like an unexpected gift. And when Hiromi’s Sonicwonder embarks on their European tour next month (including shows in Eindhoven, Groningen, and The Hague on November 7-10, followed by stops in Madrid, Weimar, Padova, Luxembourg, Toulouse, and London’s Barbican Centre on November 21), audiences will witness music that continues to push technical boundaries, even if it’s not quite pushing conceptual ones. Watching Feraud navigate these compositions live—that Pastorius-influenced melodicism married to Jackson’s architectural thinking—will be worth the price of admission alone.
“Sometimes mastery is enough. Sometimes, we need more. Hiromi gives us the former in spades; we’re still waiting for her to risk the latter.”
— David Marchese
FOR THE RECORD:
- Producer: Hiromi (Sonicwonder tracks); Michael Bishop (Trio Project tracks)
- Engineers: Andreas K. Meyer, Mick Sawaguchi, Michael Bishop, Shigeki Fujino
- Recorded: Various sessions 2011-2025, including Skywalker Sound, Nicasio, CA (Sonicwonderland sessions, May 25-28, 2023)
- Mastering: Mick Sawaguchi, Shigeki Fujino
ESSENTIAL TRACKS: “Balloon Pop,” “Voice,” “Pendulum” (feat. Michelle Willis), “Seeker,” “XYZ”
UPCOMING EUROPEAN TOUR: November 7-21, 2025 across Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, France, and UK
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