Tadao Sawai, Kazue Sawai, Takeshi Inomata, Norio Maeda & Hozan Yamamoto - Jazz Rock (Mr Bongo Vinyl LP Gatefold)

Tadao Sawai, Kazue Sawai, Takeshi Inomata, Norio Maeda & Hozan Yamamoto - Jazz Rock 琴 / 日本の民謡 | Vinyl LP Gatefold - Mr Bongo Limited Edition Reissue (MRBLP-204)

• Twelve Japanese min'yō folk songs arranged for koto, shakuhachi and a jazz rhythm section, 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.
• The drumming is why this record travelled. 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.
• First European reissue, licensed from Sony and pressed at Optimal, in a replica gatefold sleeve with replica obi and labels.

The 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.

The 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 Beautiful Bamboo-Flute with Sharps & Flats from two years earlier, which gives a sense of how central this repertoire was to what he was doing.