The Self-Released Sapporo Trio Record YouTube's Algorithm Turned Into "The" Japanese Jazz Album

On July 7, 1976, Ryo Fukui — a self-taught pianist who ran a small jazz kissa called Slowboat in Sapporo — booked Yamaha Hall for a session with his brother Yoshinori on drums and Satoshi Denpo on bass, and self-produced the result with Masataka Ito for the small Trio label. Scenery sold modestly and, per its own Wikipedia entry, was "virtually ignored" outside Japan; Fukui went back to running his club and barely recorded again for two decades, until his death in 2016. Then, sometime in the 2010s, its red cover surfaced in listeners' YouTube recommendations — the platform's algorithm apparently as curious about a decades-old, self-released trio date as any human crate-digger — and the record became, almost by accident, the one non-Japanese listeners now picture first when they picture Japanese jazz at all. WRWTFWW Records gave it a proper reissue in 2018. At least one secondary source misdates the session to September; Trio's own catalog and Wikipedia agree on July 7.