Recently, my friend, Renan Teuman, a Turkish jazz drummer, is doing very well to get gigs for our band to play original tunes by Paul Sanwald and myself.

I had a chance to take a look at his gig inquiring emails and found a line like, “Saxophone player Wataru Uchida and double bassist Paul Sanwald have formed a musical partnership spanning over 20 years since they met at the New School Jazz…”

Oh, hell yeah! Paul was the first American musician who invited me to play some gigs. It was in 2001. He was a guitarist back then. Since our best friend who was our bassist left this world young, I asked Paul to play bass for me. You know? I got nothing to lose, right? And he said ‘I can do that.’

He started with a Fender bass and, soon, he got into upright bass things. He has been practicing so hard, and these days, he is even performing with classical music orchestras and chamber music ensembles.

Pau planned to record his tunes to make a demo for gig search. In June, 2017, we got together at the Systems Two in Brooklyn. The music came out so much better than he expected so that he decided to press vinyls.

The video below is from his vinyl album releasing celebration in San Francisco. It looks like a library, doesn’t it? It's actually a bookstore, Bird & Beckett Books & Records, where

On his album, we recorded a lovely tune written by Paul Sanwald, too.

My friends in Japan say that my solo on this tune is the best of all the recordings I have ever done. That seems to mean none of my solos on my own albums can beat the one on his tune.

Two more years and it will be a quarter century to play together. Let’s see what’s going to happen!