Supported by KNKX. Kobe-born, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Takuya Kuroda is dedicated, and his eighth studio record, Everyday (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 his practice daily, nearly thirty years into his musical life. Everyday builds on and dives ever 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 a sideman and bandleader for records on the likes of 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 which 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 about the intrinsic and embedded nature of the day-to-day, the incidental rhythms of life, that is reflected and seductively expounded on 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.”