“If you’re not ready to hit on the bandstand, be careful because Japan’s little alto dynamo will be waiting the cut, ready to explode and shred you to pieces.” That was trumpeter Freddie Hendrix’s Facebook post after alto saxophonist Erena Terakubo led her Little Big Band on April 29, a day before her 34th birthday, at Dizzy’s Club.
When trumpeter/educator Tiger Okoshi discovered the 12-year-old Terakubo, 22 years ago in Sapporo, Japan, he said, “She sounded like a young Charlie Parker.” After her electrifying performance at Dizzy’s, Bird, wherever he is, had to be smiling. One of the selections was a Phil Woods arrangement of Neal Hefti’s “Repetition”, which Parker reportedly performed when he showed up unexpectedly at one of Hefti’s recording sessions in the late 1940s. It was also included on Verve’s 2015 release of Charlie Parker with Strings Deluxe Edition.
In addition to Hendrix, Terakubo’s sextet at Dizzy’s included Vincent Herring on tenor saxophone, Mike LeDonne on piano, bassist John Webber and drummer Kenny Washington. Among selections were Freddie Hubbard’s “The Intrepid Fox”, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “No More Blues”, Frank Perkins’ “Stars Fell on Alabama”, and alto saxophonist Bobby Watson’s “ETA”. The latter, also arranged by Watson, was on Art Blakey’s 1981 Concord Jazz album, Straight Ahead.
A few days after the Dizzy’s performance, the sextet members headed into the Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to record Terakubo’s album on the Savant label. In the recording studio, the band was joined by Steve Turre on trombone and shells. LeDonne also played organ, and Webber played guitar on a few of the tracks.
“Over the past five years, I’ve really gotten into writing horn arrangements, and it’s something I truly enjoy,” Terakubo said. “We recorded several of my original compositions, including ‘Passing Clouds’, ‘The Sun Will Rise Again’, and ‘Little Girl Power’, all featuring my arrangements, as well as some standards like ‘No More Blues’, ‘Girl Talk’, ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. I haven’t mixed yet, so I’m not sure which ones will be on the record.
“The album,” she continued, “includes a mix of formats: a piano quartet (piano, bass, drums, sax), an organ quartet (organ, guitar, drums, sax), and primarily a septet featuring alto, tenor, trumpet, trombone, and rhythm section.”
Terakubo, an Assistant Professor of Jazz Saxophone at Michigan State University’s College of Music, welcomed two of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington finalist bands who were in the audience for the early set at Dizzy’s: the Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, FL, and Byron Center High School in Byron, MI. Dreyfoos finished in third place in this year’s competition.
Clearly, Terakubo should be considered one of today’s preeminent voices on alto sax. When I interviewed her for the October 2023 issue of Jersey Jazz Magazine, pianist/arranger John Beasley described her as having “a unique and beautiful voice on the saxophone with one foot in tradition and the other a vision for the future.”-SANFORD JOSEPHSON
PHOTO BY CHRIS DRUKKER