Hozan Yamamoto With Sharps & Flats - Beautiful Bamboo-Flute (Mr Bongo Vinyl LP Gatefold)

Hozan Yamamoto With Sharps & Flats - Beautiful Bamboo-Flute | Vinyl LP Gatefold - Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP214)

• Shakuhachi over a full jazz big band, with Hozan Yamamoto out front and Nobuo Hara conducting his Sharps & Flats orchestra, recorded across two days at Victor Studio in Tokyo in January 1971 and originally issued on Philips.
• Arranged by Masahiko Satoh, 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.
• Official Mr Bongo reissue in gatefold sleeve, licensed from Universal and pressed at Optimal. The original Philips pressing is close to unobtainable.

The 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 & 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.

Yamamoto 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 Jazz Rock, 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.