On May 26, the Ensemble Liberte Wind Orchestra of Kawaguchi City in Japan held the 65th in their series of usually biannual concerts at the large performance hall of the Saitama City Cultural Center. They debuted a drum concerto written by Jun Nagao, a composer for orchestra and smaller ensembles who’s occasionally done soundtrack work, mostly for TV and radio dramas. The concerto was commissioned by extremely cool jazz fusion composer and drummer Maoki Yamamoto, who co-wrote it and naturally also played the drums.
Yamamoto tweeted about the piece a few times and only named Nagao as a composer without mentioning himself, suggesting that maybe his involvement was minimal despite being explicitly listed a composer in the program/score/etc., but I feel like he may have just been being modest (he’s written a 23-minute orchestra piece before, after all…). On Facebook, Nagao called it a collaborative work that demonstrates their “unified musicality,” and parts of the concerto veer away from the serious business wind orchestra zone and more into jazz and pops territory, which is more like Yamamoto’s oeuvre. Not that there’s anything wrong with the serious business wind orchestra zone! I love the serious business wind orchestra zone.
Anyway, the concerto’s pretty good. I haven’t heard anything else by Nagao so I can’t say how this compares to his other work, but it’s a solid enough wind band piece so the guy clearly knows what he’s doing. As I sort of alluded to when I mentioned it going between various styles it does kinda flit between modes in a way that sometimes comes across to me as a bit random, but maybe that’s what the “Unified Tale” of the title is referring to; you can’t just unify one tale, you gotta join multiple tales together (a slightly better translation of the Japanese 重なりあう might be “overlapping” instead of “unified”). And hey, I have no attention span anyway, so if the piece want to do something completely different a minute later, that’s fine.
If you’re just looking for Yamamoto’s cadenza, it’s in the third movement and it’s nearly five minutes long 
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