{"title":"Hozan Yamamoto","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eThe shakuhachi is a vertical bamboo flute with five finger holes, associated for centuries with Zen Buddhist meditation, and not at all an obvious candidate for jazz crossover. Hozan Yamamoto spent his career making it one anyway. Born in Ōtsu, Shiga Prefecture in 1937, he started playing at nine, taught first by his father and then by Chōzan Nakanishi, and trained formally at the Seiha Music College and the Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Studies. The conservative shakuhachi world was not entirely welcoming of what he did with it. By 1964 he was recording \"Music for Zen Meditation\" with American clarinettist Tony Scott and koto player Shinichi Yuize, and in 1966 he co-founded the Shakuhachi Sanbon Kai trio with Reibo Aoki and Katsuya Yokoyama, a grouping that pushed the instrument's possibilities in both traditional and crossover directions simultaneously. Through the 1970s he recorded prolifically in jazz contexts, working with Gary Peacock, Karl Berger, Helen Merrill, Ravi Shankar and Jean-Pierre Rampal, and composing original music for jazz big band settings alongside Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats. The \"Beautiful Bamboo Flute\" albums with Sharps and Flats, blending Japanese folk music with jazz-funk, big band and soul jazz, became the records that international collectors came looking for first. He composed the soundtrack for Kōsei Saitō's 1979 Toei film \"Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku\", with Sadistic Mika Band keyboardist Yu Imai as arranger, one of the most collectible shakuhachi jazz records from that era. He was designated a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government in 2002 and received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2004. He died on 10 February 2014 in Ōtsu, aged 76.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"hozan-yamamoto-yu-imai-akuma-ga-kitarite-fue-wo-fuku-2021-mr-bongo-vinyl-lp","title":"Hozan Yamamoto \u0026 Yu Imai - Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku (2021 Mr Bongo Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHozan Yamamoto \u0026amp; Yu Imai - \u003cem\u003eAkuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP - Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP234)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eThe soundtrack to Kōsei Saitō's \u003cem\u003eDevil's Flute\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e, a Kindaichi Kōsuke mystery adapted from Seishi Yokomizo, composed by shakuhachi master Hozan Yamamoto at the personal invitation of producer Haruki Kadokawa, with Sadistic Mika Band keyboardist Yu Imai brought in as assistant producer and arranger.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eShakuhachi and Western flute set against disco strings, funk breaks, synthesiser and dissonant orchestral atmospheres\u003c\/strong\u003e, eleven cues that swing between straight dancefloor material and genuinely unsettling scoring, which is what a murder mystery asks for.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eOfficial Mr Bongo reissue\u003c\/strong\u003e of an album that has never been easy to find in its original Nippon Columbia pressing, praised by buyers for the quality of the pressing itself.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYamamoto is the reason to pick this up. He started on shakuhachi at nine, taught first by his father and then by Chōzan Nakanishi, and by the 1960s he was the player doing most to drag a Zen Buddhist instrument with five finger holes into contexts nobody had imagined for it. He recorded \u003cem\u003eBeautiful Bamboo-Flute\u003c\/em\u003e with Nobuo Hara's Sharps \u0026amp; Flats big band in 1971. He took a trio to the Donaueschingen new music festival. He worked with Gil Evans. In 2002 the Japanese government designated him a Living National Treasure, and when he died in a Tokyo hospital in February 2014 he was the most decorated shakuhachi player alive. What he does on this record is stranger than any of that suggests, because the brief was not a concert album. Haruki Kadokawa, the producer behind the run of Kindaichi Kōsuke film adaptations that dominated Japanese cinema in the late 1970s, asked Yamamoto to score a murder mystery, then paired him with Yu Imai, who had come up through the Sadistic Mika Band and the Sadistics and knew exactly how to build a groove out of a Rhodes and a rhythm section.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe split between them is visible in the credits. Yamamoto wrote the pieces carrying the film's themes and Imai arranged them, while Imai wrote most of the rest outright. \"Fue Narinu\" opens the album with Taiichi Uemura on Western flute alongside the shakuhachi, and the same pairing returns on \"Tengindō Jiken\" and the short closing cue. \"Kaen Daiko\" is the longest thing here at six and a half minutes and is where the funk arrangement takes over completely. \"Tengindō Jiken\" is the track that has circulated most widely among diggers, a fast, tense, breaks-driven piece named for a plot element in Yokomizo's novel. \"Kindaichi Kōsuke Nishi E Iku\" scores the detective's journey. Side B moves through \"Yubi,\" a piece built on Yamamoto and Imai together under the algebraic title \"a=X, b=X, ∴ a=b,\" and \"Chi To Suna,\" the one track Yamamoto both wrote and arranged himself. \"Tabi Yuku Mono Yo\" is the vocal, sung by Rumi Enomoto to a lyric by Michio Yamagami, and then the devil finishes playing and the record stops after 107 seconds. Mr Bongo reissued this album in September 2021.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mr Bongo","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43839552847931,"sku":null,"price":65.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/a3309593818_10.jpg?v=1784775073"},{"product_id":"tadao-sawai-kazue-sawai-takeshi-inomata-norio-maeda-hozan-yamamoto-jazz-rock-mr-bongo-vinyl-lp-gatefold","title":"Tadao Sawai, Kazue Sawai, Takeshi Inomata, Norio Maeda \u0026 Hozan Yamamoto - Jazz Rock (Mr Bongo Vinyl LP Gatefold)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTadao Sawai, Kazue Sawai, Takeshi Inomata, Norio Maeda \u0026amp; Hozan Yamamoto - \u003cem\u003eJazz Rock 琴 \/ 日本の民謡\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP Gatefold - Mr Bongo Limited Edition Reissue (MRBLP-204)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eTwelve Japanese min'yō folk songs arranged for koto, shakuhachi and a jazz rhythm section\u003c\/strong\u003e, with Tadao and Kazue Sawai on koto, Hozan Yamamoto on shakuhachi, Takeshi Inomata on drums and Norio Maeda writing the charts, originally issued on RCA Japan in 1973.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eThe drumming is why this record travelled.\u003c\/strong\u003e Inomata plays heavy, funk-derived breaks underneath melodies that are centuries old, and the collision has made the album a target for beat diggers as much as for anyone interested in Japanese traditional music.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eFirst European reissue\u003c\/strong\u003e, licensed from Sony and pressed at Optimal, in a replica gatefold sleeve with replica obi and labels.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title has misled people for fifty years. There is electric guitar on this record and there is distortion, but nothing here sounds like Anglo-American jazz rock. What it is instead is a set of min'yō, the regional folk songs that form Japan's equivalent of a traditional song repertoire, arranged by Norio Maeda for an ensemble that puts two koto and a shakuhachi at the front and a jazz rhythm section behind them. Sadanori Nakamure plays guitar, Tatsuro Takimoto plays bass, Jake H. Concepcion is on alto, and there are trumpets and trombone in the arrangements. Takeshi Inomata, one of the most important drummers in post-war Japanese jazz, plays the whole thing with a weight and a snap that has nothing to do with folk accompaniment. That is the tension the album runs on, and it is why the record has been picked up by people who came looking for breaks rather than for koto music. Mr Bongo's own description compares it to something Madlib might have dreamed up while lost in Japan, which is glib but not wrong.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Sawais are the reason this is more than a novelty. Tadao Sawai, born in Aichi in 1938 and a graduate of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, was one of the most significant koto composers of the twentieth century and invented a modified instrument of his own design. Kazue Sawai, his wife, spent a career pulling the koto into contemporary composition, working with John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Sofia Gubaidulina, David Behrman, Carl Stone and John Zorn, and teaching a generation of players including Michiyo Yagi. Hozan Yamamoto was recognised as a Living National Treasure in 2002. These were not session players slumming it on a crossover record. The same core group, plus Nakamure, Takimoto and Inomata, had already made an album of Bach played on koto for RCA Red Seal in 1971, so the idea of running traditional Japanese instruments through unfamiliar repertoire was something they had been working at for years by the time they turned it on their own folk tradition. Five of the songs here also appear on Yamamoto's \u003cem\u003eBeautiful Bamboo-Flute\u003c\/em\u003e with Sharps \u0026amp; Flats from two years earlier, which gives a sense of how central this repertoire was to what he was doing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mr Bongo","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43839916900411,"sku":null,"price":60.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/a0165943960_10.jpg?v=1784776516"},{"product_id":"hozan-yamamoto-with-sharps-flats-beautiful-bamboo-flute-mr-bongo-vinyl-lp-gatefold","title":"Hozan Yamamoto With Sharps \u0026 Flats - Beautiful Bamboo-Flute (Mr Bongo Vinyl LP Gatefold)","description":"\u003cp\u003eHozan Yamamoto With Sharps \u0026amp; Flats - \u003cem\u003eBeautiful Bamboo-Flute\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP Gatefold - Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP214)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eShakuhachi over a full jazz big band\u003c\/strong\u003e, with Hozan Yamamoto out front and Nobuo Hara conducting his Sharps \u0026amp; Flats orchestra, recorded across two days at Victor Studio in Tokyo in January 1971 and originally issued on Philips.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eArranged by Masahiko Satoh\u003c\/strong\u003e, one of the most adventurous pianists and composers in Japanese jazz, whose charts push eleven traditional min'yō folk songs into heavy brass, electric bass and funk-derived grooves without flattening the melodies.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eOfficial Mr Bongo reissue in gatefold sleeve\u003c\/strong\u003e, licensed from Universal and pressed at Optimal. The original Philips pressing is close to unobtainable.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe arranger is the credit that explains this record, and almost nobody mentions him. Masahiko Satoh was in his late twenties when he wrote these charts, already one of the most restless figures in Japanese jazz, a musician who would spend the following decades moving between free improvisation, electronics and large-ensemble composition. What he does here is take eleven min'yō, the regional folk songs that make up Japan's traditional repertoire, and set them for a big band that had been playing American jazz in Japan since the early 1950s. Nobuo Hara had formed the Sharps \u0026amp; Flats in 1951 and the orchestra had spent twenty years becoming the most accomplished big band in the country. Satoh writes for them the way an American arranger of the same period might have written for Basie or Thad Jones, then puts a bamboo flute on top of it. The result should be an awkward compromise and it is not. Yamamoto's shakuhachi has enough tonal weight and enough breath in it to sit over a horn section without being buried, and the melodies were built for a solo wind instrument in the first place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYamamoto was 33 and roughly a decade into the career that would end with him designated a Living National Treasure in 2002. He had been playing the instrument since he was nine, first taught by his father, and he spent the 1960s and 1970s doing more than anyone to find contexts for it outside its Zen Buddhist origins. This is the most immediately enjoyable of those experiments and the one that has travelled furthest, largely because the grooves underneath are heavy enough to interest people who could not name a single min'yō. Mr Bongo's own comparison is to Dorothy Ashby's Cadet albums with the harp swapped for a flute, which gets at the appeal accurately enough. Five of these songs, Kuroda-Bushi, Hietsuki-Bushi, Sado Okesa, Itsuki No Komori-Uta and Nanbu Ushioi-Uta, turn up again two years later on \u003cem\u003eJazz Rock\u003c\/em\u003e, where Yamamoto plays them alongside Tadao and Kazue Sawai's koto with Norio Maeda arranging. The two records make a pair, and hearing the same tunes handled by two different arrangers is the clearest way into what both albums are actually doing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mr Bongo","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43840119242811,"sku":null,"price":65.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/a1864549288_10.jpg?v=1784777553"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/hozan-yamamoto.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}