Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band - Kogun (1974 Japanese RCA RCA-6246 Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: VG+

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Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band - Kogun | Vinyl LP - 1974 Japanese RCA Original (RCA-6246, Victor Musical Industries)

Akiyoshi had been waiting 20 years for a big band. She was discovered by Oscar Peterson in 1952, playing a club on the Ginza. Peterson convinced Norman Granz to record her, and by 1956 she was the first Japanese student at Berklee. She played small groups in New York through the 1960s, but what she wanted was an orchestra. In 1972, she and her husband Lew Tabackin moved to Los Angeles, and in March 1973 they formed a big band from the city's deep pool of studio musicians. The personnel reads like a West Coast all-star session: Bobby Shew, Don Rader and Mike Price on trumpets, Britt Woodman (who had spent a decade in Duke Ellington's orchestra) on trombone, Gary Foster and Dick Spencer on altos, Bill Perkins on baritone, Gene Cherico on bass, Peter Donald on drums. Tabackin plays tenor and flute as the band's primary soloist. Akiyoshi composed and arranged everything. "Elegy" opens the album with a 9-minute piece that lets Tabackin's tenor unspool over the ensemble in long, lyrical passages. "Memory" stretches past 10 minutes with the horns building in layers.

The title track takes the album to different territory. Akiyoshi draws on Noh theatre, with Scott Elsworth's voice carrying a chant-like melody against the horns, while the rhythm section plays with a weight and deliberateness that sounds nothing like conventional big band swing. The piece is her response to the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who spent 29 years in the Philippine jungle after the war ended, loyal to orders he believed were still in force. Akiyoshi described him not as a fanatic but as a draftee caught in a situation he never chose. "American Ballad" brings the album back to a more conventional setting, and "Henpecked Old Man" closes with over nine minutes of the band at its most driving. When Ellington died later that year, Nat Hentoff wrote in the Village Voice about how Ellington's music reflected his African heritage. Akiyoshi read the piece and was inspired to push deeper into her own Japanese musical identity, a direction that defined everything she wrote from this point forward. This is the original 1974 Japanese pressing on RCA RCA-6246, manufactured by Victor Musical Industries.