Joshua Breakstone Three
June 21, 2025
Sometime
Joshua Breakstoneジョシュア・ブレイクストーン -- guitar
Yutaka Yoshida吉田 豊 -- bass
Shingo Okudaira奥平 真吾 – drums
Joshua Breakstone has played and recorded with some amazing musicians over the years, Kenny Barron, Barry Harris, Pepper Adams, JoAnne Brackeen, and tommy Flanagan among many others. Japan has been lucky enough to have him settle here for a few years, touring and playing amazing jazz all over the country. He was joined by two of Tokyo’s best and busiest musicians, Yoshida and Okudaira.
His trio’s performance at Sometime was another in his evenings of fluid jazz guitar virtuosity. He knows how to call the tunes, and he started off with Barry Harris’ “Luminescence,” an up-tempo 60s tune that combines something of big band melodic style combined with a post-bop drive. Breakstone took the song at a fast tempo and it was easy to see how deeply he sank into the song by watching his first solo. It was extensive, thorough, and pleasing.
His guitar style owes something to Grant Green and Wes Montgomery both for chording and single-line melodies, but his solos also harken back to the tight, quick style of bop innovators. Watching his fingers move over the fretboard for solos, the knuckle-breaking fluidity of his fingering is not something you can catch, or comprehend. But that’s just fine. It’s always gorgeous, evocative, and steeped in jazz feeling.
He's not afraid to slow it down, either. “Where or When,” a lovely ballad, showed off his tone and taste. “More Than You Know,” another lovely ballad, was filled with unique chording, tasteful passing notes, and melodic invention. Thelonius Monk’s “Epistrophe” picked up the pace but kept the charging drive and structured beauty of the original while letting Yoshida have ample room to solo and Okudaira space to play with the rhythm. The trio was a perfect match.
“Lolita,” another tune by Barry Harris was mid-tempo enough to take a breath (at least for the audience) between phrases, but quick enough to call up the ghosts of Wes Montgomery. Breakstone is constantly inventive, natural and fluid in his fingering and approach to the fretboard. He has a command of the deepest parts of the jazz playbook. It’s fascinating that he calls so many tunes by pianists, but that only serves as a reminder of how the guitar is another ten-fingered instrument in the right hands. Breakstone’s hands are certainly the right ones.
