Takuya Kuroda

Kobe-born, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Takuya Kuroda is dedicated, and his eighth studio record, Everyday (out Feb. 28, 2025), is proof of that. Since the release of his soulful seventh effort, 2022’s Midnight Crisp—a record praised by PopMatters as a “future classic”—Kuroda has not missed a beat. In his desire to achieve the “perfect blend of production and organic performance,” the 45-year-old musician has continued to throw himself into daily practice, nearly thirty years into his musical life. Everyday builds on and dives even deeper into the hip-hop and neo-soul elements of his previous work. It is a deliciously rhythmic enterprise and a triumph of genre-blending modern jazz. Kuroda’s playing is sure-footed and pure—whether on the horn, synth, or Rhodes—and he virtuosically dances among infectious rhythms of his own creation.

Kuroda’s twenty-one years in the United States have been fruitful. After studying composition at the New School, he threw himself into work, playing with DJ Premier’s Badder Band and Akoya Afrobeat, and recording as both sideman and bandleader for releases on labels such as Blue Note and Concord. But as Kuroda himself says, “the only way to make the music that I want to make is to work hard, every day.” And so we have Everyday, a title that reflects, as Kuroda puts it, “that simple message.”

There is a certain duality to the title that taps into something profound about this music. “Everyday,” of course, means both daily and commonplace. While Kuroda’s music is anything but average, there is something in the intrinsic, embedded nature of day-to-day life—the incidental rhythms of living—that is reflected and seductively expanded upon here. Kuroda describes the process of recording Everyday like this: “Make tracks at home, bring them to the studio, add or replace sounds, invite musicians, repeat the process to polish the track—as I hear it.”

There is both a no-nonsense work ethic and a sense of embeddedness—an everydayness—that Kuroda achieves through this practice, something that perhaps cannot be accessed if one simply waits to enter the studio to begin work. Kuroda builds, tweaks, plays, and polishes until what comes through the speakers matches what has been playing in his head every day. This is what ensures his skillful synthesis of influences, which Dean Van Nguyen noted while reviewing 2020’s Fly Moon Die Soon for Pitchfork. One is left with the sense that Kuroda has been tapping it all out wherever he goes—drumming his fingers on a diner counter, shuffling his feet along a park pathway—manifesting the rhythms of his mind. “Groove,” Kuroda says, “is the foundation for all the tracks on Everyday.” And atop that strong foundation, brought to life by the energy of David Frazier’s drumming, Kuroda’s shimmering lyricism dances all over Everyday.