In April 2025, Argentinian, Brooklyn-based pianist Leo Genovese just finished a concert with The Mars Volta at Madison Square Garden and had ninety free minutes before the tour bus would move on. He called his friends - Japanese, Tokyo-based double bass player (and cellist) Takeshi Sugawa, one of the busiest musicians in the Japanese scene, leader of his Banksia trio, who hosted Genovese in his debut album as bandleader (Outgrowing, 2018, with drummer Tom Rainey), who was in New York as part of the Satoko Fujii Tokyo Trio North American tour, and Australian drummer Alfred Vogel, of How Noisy Are the Rooms? And Vanish trios, the founder of Boomslang Records and the Bezau Beatz festival, who was visiting New York and had previously recorded with Genovese (Eyes to the Sun, Boomslang, 2024, with fellow Argentinian sax player Camila Nebbia).
Sugawa and Vogel did not know each other, and the ad-hoc trio played a short, free-improvised session in a small restaurant. They immediately felt the magic of shared, light pulse. Genovese, Sugawa, and Vogel promised each other that they had to repeat this experience. It did not take long. In May 2025, Genovese played in Berlin with Esperanza Spalding, Sugawa was touring in Europe, and Vogel booked the Bonello Studio in Berlin for an all-night, free-improvised recording session that produced Unleashed.
The music is quite spacious and understated, sketching its movement with delicate, skeletal strokes, without a plan and with no aim of reaching cohesive structures or grooves, as if asking the listener to be an active part of its creation and imagine where it can land. Genovese, Sugawa, and Vogel are attuned to every sound and gesture, as each one opens more sonic threads, but without attaching themselves to any of them. Melodic veins rise and dissolve organically, but the deep listening, deeply poetic, spontaneous, primal, and collective, egalitarian process is the essence of this trio. The trio distills its dynamics on the poetic, 13-minute “A World of One Colour”. Letting go and just being in the moment when everything opens, or, as Sugawa puts it, “A spirit that wanders, that lives across times and places.”
Hopefully, Genovese, Sugawa, and Vogel would find time in their busy schedules to take this trio on the road, letting it blossom even more on a tight tour.
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