About

Making his first trip to the U.S. just 13 years ago to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz musician, trumpeter/composer Takuya Kuroda is a forward- thinking artist with a bent towards mixing post- pop and adventurous soul-jazz. With his inventive compositions, which include everything from jazz, funk, hip-hop, and Afro-beat, he is primed to become a major voice on the 21st-century modern soul-jazz scene. A fixture on the New York scene for the past decade, Kuroda has performed with big league players such as Valery Ponomarev, Junior Mance, Greg Tardy, and Andy Ezrin.

Rising Sun is the perfect title for the Blue Note debut from Takuya Kuroda, who is perhaps best known for his inspired presence in vocalist José James’s band over the past several years. Friends since their student days at Berklee, Kuroda contributed significantly to James’s 2010 album Blackmagic, and his critically hailed 2013 Blue Note album No Beginning No End, a project for which he also wrote the horn arrangements. “No one sounds like Takuya,” says James. “His tone, warmth and most of all his storytelling have inspired me for years. His writing is soulful, modern, and effortlessly bridges the gap between jazz and soul, and between history and tomorrow.”

“A transcendent horn player “—Washington Post

“Kuroda pulls you into his world from the downbeat . . . It’s a world informed by jazz, soul, R&B, and especially Afro-beat”—DownBeat