For years, Takuro Okada has carried a quiet question: how can a Japanese musician honor the music of African Americans without simply borrowing it? That search shapes his new album Konoma, a work guided by the idea of “Afro Mingei.” The Tokyo guitarist, producer, and bandleader has lived inside this tension since childhood, drawn to blues, jazz, and funk records that nourished him, yet hesitant in the face of the histories they hold. The concept of Afro Mingei, which Okada first encountered in an exhibition by artist Theaster Gates, gave him a way forward. Gates connected Black aesthetics with Japanese folk craft, both rooted in resistance — “Black is Beautiful” defying racism, the Mingei movement preserving everyday beauty against industrial erasure. That kinship became the compass for Konoma, a record attuned to echoes across cultures and time.
Konoma holds six originals and two covers, all shaped by this dialogue. The elegantly
unhurried “Portrait of Yanagi” drifts like a standard half-remembered from another era, while
the brief but potent “Galaxy” gestures toward Sun Ra’s late 1970s electric organ experiments,
the fractured propulsion of Flying Lotus’s early beat tapes, and the shadowy atmospheres of
trip-hop. Okada’s choice of covers sharpens the conversation: Jan Garbarek’s “Nefertite”
shimmers with the cool austerity of 1970s ECM, reframing Europe’s own search for identity
inside jazz, while Hiromasa Suzuki’s “Love” channels the electric vibrancy of 1970s Japanese
fusion, when musicians fused psychedelia, funk, and folk into a distinctly local dialect.
Together, they anchor Konoma in a lineage of artists who bent borrowed forms toward
something new.
With Konoma, co-released by ISC Hi-Fi Selects and Temporal Drift, Okada delivers his most
personal and expansive statement yet: a meditation on connection, influence, and the
beauty that survives across cultures.