Hozan Yamamoto & Yu Imai - Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku (2021 Mr Bongo Vinyl LP)

Hozan Yamamoto & Yu Imai - Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku | Vinyl LP - Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP234)

• The soundtrack to Kōsei Saitō's Devil's Flute, 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.
• Shakuhachi and Western flute set against disco strings, funk breaks, synthesiser and dissonant orchestral atmospheres, eleven cues that swing between straight dancefloor material and genuinely unsettling scoring, which is what a murder mystery asks for.
• Official Mr Bongo reissue 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.

Yamamoto 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 Beautiful Bamboo-Flute with Nobuo Hara's Sharps & 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.

The 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.