"Featuring Masahiko Satoh (piano) and Giotis Damianidis (guitar). Recorded live on the 2nd of February, 2024 at Jazz Spot Candy, Chiba, Japan by Kosuke Kohashi. Despite the geographic distance and a 40-year age difference, Japanese pianist Masahiko Sato and Greek guitarist Giotis Damianidis are kindred souls in a certain sense, each possessing a keen understanding of how improvised music can magically erase such boundaries.

Thousand Leaves captures their very first meeting in 2024. While Sato sticks with an acoustic piano and Damianidis embraces an amplified guitar sound closer to rock music than jazz, they reveal a strong rapport, entwining, colliding, and considering how their very distinctive threads fit together, in real time. Even as the guitarist produces flinty sparks, distortion, and effects-driven bends and swoop, Sato's quicksilver improvisations manage to draw upon a separate set of modalities, his elegant playing steeped in classical music cadences as much as post-bopruns."-Trost

"Japanese pianist Masahiko Satoh (b.1941) is a titanic figure in Japan's rich history of jazz, free jazz, and free improvised music since the late sixties, collaborating and recording with local heroes like percussionist Stomu Yamashita, drummer Togashi Masahiko, pianist Aki Takase, and trumpeter Itaru Oki, and with Joëlle Léandre, Ned Rothenberg, Peter Brötzmann, and Paal Nilssen-Love. Greek, Brussels-based guitarist Giotis Damianidis was born forty years after Satoh, and has established a strong bond with another Japanese hero of free jazz and free improvised music, reed player-vocalist Akira Sakata, with whom he recorded a duo album and with the ensemble Entasis (Live in Europe 2022, Trost, 2023).

Thousand Leaves 千 葉 is the first collaboration of Satoh and Damianidis, and was recorded at their first-ever, free improvised meeting at Jazz Spot Candy in Chiba in February 2024 during Damianidis' first visit to Japan. When Damianidis returned for a second visit to Japan, he performed in a quartet with Satoh, Sakata, and drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. The album's title refers to the oldest collection of Japanese waka poetry, the Man'yōshū, 万葉集, literally "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves".

Satoh and Damianidis immediately found a common, inquisitive sonic language that employs extended techniques to shape, sculpt, and color sound and erase all generational, geographic, or genre boundaries. The opening piece, the 19-minute "First Ghost" sketches a mysterious, timeless texture where Satoh's always elegant and mostly lyrical playing on the acoustic piano is contrasted by Damianidis' effects-laden, urgent but abstract amplified electric guitar. Slowly, Satoh introduces brief quotes of classical music and post-bop while Damianidis settles on a distorted course, but these gifted improvisers converse without compromising their distinct languages, obviously, with many intense collisions. The following four pieces deepen the strong rapport established in the first piece and allow for more playful and rhythmic or contemplative dynamics, with a few ironic comments, and more space that emphasizes their idiosyncratic, uncompromising voices. The last piece, "Filigree", suggests an imaginative, free-associative, and intense abstraction of a twisted but passionate Greek dance.

A masterful performance of the art of the moment."-Eyal Hareuveni, The Free Jazz Collective