The trio of young, Japanese-born, Irish-based pianist Izumi Kimura with British double bass player Barry Guy and American drummer Gerry Hemingway is by no means a typical piano trio. These musicians are idiosyncratic composers and improvisers refusing to surrender to genre conventions. Both Guy and Hemingway are titans of free improvisation. Guy composed music for orchestras, conducted guided improvisations, and plays baroque music. Hemingway experimented with electronic music, multimedia projects, and being a singer-songwriter.
This trio released its debut, the excellent live album, Illuminated Silence (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2019), a year before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and three years before the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out. Kimura continued to work with Guy (in a quartet, Kind of Light, Fundacja Słuchaj, 2022) and in a duo with Hemingway (Kairos, Fundacja Słuchaj, 2023). The trio recorded Six Hands Open As One, its second studio album at The Meadow in
