A brilliant album by Hozan Yamamoto – a flute player with a great ear for mixing traditional sounds and modern jazz! The set's a suite of sorts – performed by a cool quartet with Yamamoto on bamboo flute, plus Masabumi Kikuchi on piano, Gary Peacock on bass, and Hiroshi Murakami on drums – all with a rich sense of poetry and feeling, that newly expressive sound that Japanese jazz hit as the 70s approached! Yamamoto's flute work alone is worth the price of admission – but alongside Kikuchi's well-timed (and toned) piano lines, and Peacock's roundly sensitive bass, the instrument is even more brilliant – heard on tracks that include "Silver World", "Stone Garden Of Ryoan Temple", "A Heavy Shower", and "Sawanose". (Jazz, Japanese) CD

A tremendous first outing as a leader for Japanese saxophonist Kosuke Mine – one of our favorite players of the 70s, already sounding wonderful here right at the start! The album's got a freewheeling vibe – not entirely avant, and maybe more in the modal territory unlocked by Miles Davis a few years before – although with a very different vibe, given the Mine's in the lead on alto! Yet the group also features some very Miles-like use of electric piano – handled here by Masabumi Kikuchi, a key young contemporary of Mine, and one who'd gotten a bit more of a head start in the world of recording – really adding a lot to the record here, next to the very forward-thinking rhythm duo of American players Larry Ridley on bass and Lenny McBrowne on drums! All tracks are nice and long, and most are originals – the kind of open, long-spun cuts that really herald all the great changes taking place on the Japanese jazz scene at the time. Titles include "Little Abbi", "McPhee", "Love Taken", "Morning Tide", and "Bar L'Len". (Jazz, Japanese) LP, Vinyl record album