Takuya Nakamura had to be talked into recording half his new album live at fabric

The route here runs back almost 35 years – high school jazz nights watching Sonny Rollins live, a scholarship-level education at Boston’s New England Conservatory under George Russell, the man who taught Miles Davis and Coltrane how to think about harmony differently, and then a second, unrelated discovery: a venue near Boston in 1992 where the elderly owner had his own soundsystem playing something not yet widely known as jungle. “You’re always making decisions,” Nakamura says of what the two worlds share, “but it doesn’t have to be really difficult. It’s the truth of the frequencies, and how they’re affecting people’s minds.” A CV that now runs through Sun Ra Arkestra, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson, Lee “Scratch” Perry and GZA followed from there.

He’d wanted to play fabric “since I was very young,” and it took a fabric team member’s daughter spotting him live before anyone there clocked it. Chapter 2 isn’t just a DJ set with a horn player added – it’s Nakamura duetting with the club’s own soundsystem.

New single “Broken Jazz,” featuring London jungle producer Tim Reaper, pairs vintage trumpet with breakbeat and is the first taste of a record that moves from reverberant ambient jazz into cinematic breakbeat, hits a percussion-and-piano midpoint somewhere between a jazz ensemble, a Metalheadz 12″ and a Theo Parrish DJ set, and closes on a cover of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up,” Nakamura’s own vocal sitting inside a huge mix.

Chapter 1 (studio album) – out digitally October 29th:

1. Takara Island ft. Shigeto
2. Broken Jazz ft. Tim Reaper
3. Make A Wish
4. Shape The Future ft. Greentea Peng
5. Monium
6. Don’t Give Up

Chapter 2 (live album) – out digitally November 12th, alongside standard black and deluxe orange vinyl (both chapters combined):

1. Balloon Song
2. Monium
3. Round About
4. Takara Island ft. Shigeto
5. Broken Jazz ft. Tim Reaper
6. Make A Wish ft. Currency Audio
7. Don’t Give Up

Shape The Future is released by fabric records. Nakamura tours extensively through the rest of the year, with UK and Ireland dates in Leeds (Oct 12), Newcastle (Oct 13), Sheffield (Oct 15), Manchester (Oct 16), London (Oct 17), Glasgow (Oct 24), Edinburgh (Oct 25), Dublin (Oct 29), Belfast (Oct 30) and Bristol’s Simple Things Festival (Nov 7).

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