The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and jazz-rap artist’s self-titled double album conceals a reflective sorrow within its blissful swirl of beats and blips.
Sen Morimoto’s music is an open book. Diaristic, fragmented lyrics and layers upon layers of harmonies pile into his kinetic jazz rap. It’s a heavy book—an encyclopedia, probably. A jazz saxophonist since childhood, Morimoto gobbled up other instruments and disciplines along the way from his birthplace of Kyoto to small-town Massachusetts, where he grew up and began gravitating towards hip-hop, and then to his current home in Chicago. Or maybe it’s a phone book: In just the past couple of years, Morimoto has collaborated in an impressive range of circles, playing on albums by jazz ensemble Resavoir, pop singer KAINA, rappers Ric Wilson and Joseph Chilliams, and indie bands Lala Lala and Vagabon.
In July, Morimoto took his openness to a new level. When the City of Chicago invited him to appear on the “Millennium Park at Home” virtual series, Morimoto took the chance to call out his mayor—and was promptly removed from the bill. “I would like to add my extreme disappointment in the lack of action that has been taken by Mayor Lightfoot and our elected officials here in response to over 100,000 protesters here in Chicago demanding the police be defunded and CPAC [the Civilian Police Accountability Council] be enacted,” he said in his submitted video. The city gave him a chance to recant; he declined, and his colleague Tasha followed him out the door.
Disappointment permeates the lyrics of Morimoto’s self-titled second album, too. He imagines a future where everyone has left for Jupiter; he raps about being too tired to feign happiness and crying so loudly it upsets his dog. But you might not notice any of that, because musically, the dominant mood is blissful and relentlessly hyperactive—more suggestive of happy daydreams than the flat, grey slog of this year’s bad-news parade. The album’s sound is downright optimistic; if you knew nothing else of him, you might wonder if he has been living on Jupiter for the past several months.
Morimoto turns his imagination loose, filling up a double album that bursts with vivid color and gnarly chord structures, as well as a laundry list of guest features—some of which serve his love of working with friends a little more than they serve the song. Where his debut album, Cannonball!, was built by subtraction (as he explained, he wrote by overcrowding his songs with parts, then stripping them away one by one), Sen Morimoto lets it all fly. Bigger drums and lavish beats take over for the less adorned boom-bap propulsion of his last effort, and songs are washed, but not often drowned, in rainfalls of keys and blips.
One of the biggest surprises here is that Morimoto mostly leaves his sax at home, with the exception of the album’s bookends—he blares it loud enough to set off a car alarm on the opener, spins a few upward-spiraling phrases on the closer, and that’s pretty much it. Instead he branches out with other tools, playing around with different guitars, synths, and production techniques, manning everything himself except for the live drums. But the album’s riskiest, and often best, moments come when he sings. He tries his hand, respectably, at being a full-on crooner on “Wrecked” and casually ascends a tower of harmonies on the breezy highlight “Symbols, Tokens,” taking two or three extra steps up that build into one glorious payoff note. “Everything reminds me of you,” he sings; the whole song feels like a warped, digital “God Only Knows” sung from a convertible.
With each sharp twist, Morimoto racks up originality points—whether they land or not, they are certifiably, uncompromisingly out there. And while his progressions and arrangements can be breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, they’re also occasionally coupled with the sense that he’s trying too many things at once. You can’t help but wonder what his instrumental album would sound like, or one where he stretches his voice beyond perpetual chillness, or where he narrows and focuses his words. Sen Morimoto’s hindrances arise from the same place as its distinguishing qualities: an atmosphere of infinite possibility.
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