You don’t need to know Ohno’s story for this music to move you. But knowing it makes every note feel like a declaration: I’m still here, and I’m still reaching.
Pulsebeats Records
Shunzo Ohno – trumpet; Quintin Zoto – guitar; Francis Jacob – guitar; Clifford Carter – piano, keys; Noah Rott – piano; Jeremiah Edwards, Leo Traversa, Yoshi Waki – bass; Thierry Arpino – drums; Jerome Jennings – drums; Lotus Chamber Music Collective — strings (led by Sasha Ono)
Resilience has a sound, and on Live at Joe’s Pub, it belongs to Shunzo Ohno. A serious car accident that damaged his lips and teeth, followed by throat cancer treatment, forced him to completely relearn how to play trumpet. What had been a technically precise bebop style changed. Now he can sound bright and clear one moment, and then, otherworldly. Ghostly. Electronic processing, especially his wah-wah pedal let him push his tone toward something darker. That and his use of funk grooves invite comparisons to Miles Davis’s fusion period.
Recorded across three evening-length concerts at the legendary New York venue, the album features Ohno’s working ensemble alongside the Lotus Chamber Music Collective, a string quartet led by his daughter Sasha Ono. His arrangements have a quality that reveals itself immediately on the folk-like opener “Going Home” — a hip-hop groove anchoring shimmering keyboards and strings, each musician distinct, yet somehow Ohno pulls them into a single rolling wave of sound. That ability to honor individual voices while binding them into something larger runs through the entire album.
Two pieces — “Vision” and “Heroic Dance” — began life as movements in Ohno’s 2023 symphony EPIC. Shrinking them down for a small ensemble and replacing the French horn with Quintin Zoto’s guitar sounds like it shouldn’t work. In “Vision” it absolutely does — Zoto’s guitar rings out like a call from the wild, echo and vibrato giving it an expansive, cinematic quality. Clifford Carter’s piano solo arrives mid-piece with an easy melodic flow that turns percussive before he steps back abruptly, handing things back to the ensemble.
“I really had to digest ‘Moonlight Sonata,” Ohno says of his Beethoven cover, “but the arrangement had to be me.” He chose the piece for its composer’s resilience as much as its beauty — “Beethoven’s life was so difficult. He’s like my hero — not only by the music but by how he lived.” That kinship comes through in the arrangement itself. where every musician holds an important place rather than simply framing Ohno’s trumpet.
“Dreamers,” inspired by communities in northern Japan still recovering from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, may be the album’s emotional peak. The guitar opens it quietly, the piece accumulating — electric keyboard, strings, a funky undertow from bass and drums. Ohno’s trumpet sounds far away, but he’s mirroring the keyboard’s melody. When it ends the crowd at Joe’s Pub erupts, cheering and yelling. “Musashi” closes everything out with Ohno and Carter trading rumbling piano and echoing trumpet phrases before the full ensemble joins, Zoto’s guitar taking off with the electric bass pushing him on, strings sweeping in behind.
You don’t need to know Ohno’s story for this music to move you. But knowing it makes every note feel like a declaration: I’m still here, and I’m still reaching.
