"Spectacular live recording from 1986 of two seminal figures of the Japanese avantgarde -- Akira Sakata on saxophone and Takeo Moriyama on drums. Mitochondria captures the reunion of the two free jazz masters, who started playing together in the Yosuke Yamashita Trio in 1972 until 1975. For both, the experience with the trio was an important step in the development of their own career and musicianship. The recordings are a remarkable performance in which each successfully highlights the essential elements of his playing while giving of room for the other musician.

Recorded at Kashiwa Church Chiba Pref. in Japan on May 24, 1986 by Yukio Tezuka on Sony stereo cassette recorder. Mixed by Jim O'Rourke, Mastered by Martin Siewert."-Trost

"When Akira Sakata spoke with The Wire's James Hadfield for a profile published in 2014, the clarinet and alto saxophone player looked back in the way that people who are about to turn 70 sometimes do. At the time, Sakata's assessment of the music he used to play with the Yosuke Yamashita Trio, the storied ensemble that broke Sakata to audiences outside of Japan in the mid-1970s, was "combat sport." Search out the Trio's music and you'll hear a band capable of turning on a dime, from steam-rolling free jazz blow-outs to ultra-tight ensemble passages; it's no wonder that they wowed the European jazz festival circuit.

The drummer who sparred with Sakata and pianist/bandleader Yamashita during those times was Takeo Moriyama. Both he and Sakata broke from Yamashita in the late 1970s to do other things: Moriyama to lead muscular, bop-rooted jazz bands, and Sakata to become a showbiz personality, marine biology researcher, and maker of much smoother music. When they reunited for the 1986 duo concert that yielded Mitochondria, free jazz was already part of their past. But if you know Sakata's 21st century work, you already know that he's not a guy to leave his skeletons in the closet. No, he'll take them out and dance around, and if the feelings run high enough, maybe get into a death-defying wrestling match with them. In recent years, when he's mainly played with the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Paal Nilssen-Love, and the duo Chikamorachi, old-style bones are the only bones he'll roll with, and he persistently makes them appear to be newly animated.

In 1986, when Sakata and Moriya reunited for the recording under consideration, no one had any reason to think that either guy knew where the closet keys were hidden. But the outcome of their reunion probably made some first-generation Japanese free jazz heads very happy. The two men didn't just reminisce about the glory days of a decade earlier when they convened at Kashiwa Church in Chiba prefecture; they drew upon that shared history of energy music to make some sounds that were compelling in the moment, and remain deeply affecting today, despite spending decades consigned to a cassette tape.

Sakata opens the concert, which is spread across two discs, with a gripping solo excursion on clarinet. He travels an intricate and unhurried melodic circuit before raising his first overblown hackles. Then Moriyama storms in with an irresistible barrage, steady and intense, but unevenly punctuated, so that it sounds more off-kilter than it is. Sakata switches to alto and punches out long, impassioned phrases that jab, feint and corkscrew. If these guys were old boxers, they might have been dressed more fancily, but they remained still in fighting trim.

Musical pugilism, however, is not all that happens here. If they're indeed looking back on the clarinet blues, "Tsui-oka (Reminiscence)," it's with palpable melancholy. And when Moriyama takes a solo on "Satsuki," he forgoes both genre signifiers and chops-flashing imperatives to build a stark, involving expression of movement and structure. Lest anyone have any lingering doubts where they were coming from, the first disc closes with a celebratory version of Albert Ayler's "Ghosts." Then it's on to "Chiasma," a tune by the Yosuke Yamashita Trio, whose hairpin shifts they take at a breakneck place. This isn't about showing that the guys still have what it takes; it's about them and their witnesses breathing the same air in the moment, and breathing it as one. Sakata's "Dance" is as convoluted and exhilarating as similar vintage Anthony Braxton, and "Wann kann Ich sie wiedersehen" closes the proceedings on a note of rawly expressed sentiment. Sakata would not play like this a lot in the coming decade or two, but you can take his wooly blowing as an early affirmation that he would remember and he would be back."-Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine