Jiro Inagaki

Beat Beat Beat sits in the middle of a run of covers albums Inagaki cut for Nippon Columbia in 1969: commercial jazz-pop aimed at the Japanese domestic market, polished and accessible and not particularly interested in jazz as an exploratory language. Inagaki was thirty-five years old and had been playing professionally for over a decade, but Nippon Columbia had specific ideas about what they wanted from their jazz releases.

The material is mostly rock and pop hits of the day plus a couple of film themes, handled with professional efficiency. Inagaki's tenor playing is consistently warm and fluid, and even in this commercial context you can hear the quality that would make the funk records of the mid-seventies so compelling: a directness of attack and a warmth of tone that doesn't vary regardless of the material.

Beat Beat Beat is exactly what it sounds like: a workmanlike commercial covers date from a talented musician in a constraining context. It tells you where Inagaki started, which is useful context for understanding where he ended up.

Screen Mood is an easy-listening jazz date built around film and television themes, a format that was commercially reliable in Japan in the late sixties and that gave Inagaki's tenor saxophone a melodic showcase without requiring improvisation of any depth. It's pleasant in the way that well-made commercial product is pleasant.

The arrangements are lush and strings-forward, Inagaki's tenor floating above them with an ease that is either natural talent or the practiced ease of a session veteran. Either way, the playing is never less than professional and occasionally genuinely lovely on the slower, more ballad-oriented material.

Screen Mood is one of those records that exists as evidence of a moment in a musician's career rather than as a statement about where they were artistically. Inagaki was giving Nippon Columbia what they wanted, and he was good enough at it to make it sound effortless.

The premise of All About R&B is straightforward: an R&B covers album with Inagaki's tenor saxophone taking the lead vocal role. The American soul and rhythm-and-blues of the late sixties translated surprisingly well to this treatment, partly because Inagaki's tone has a vocal quality that suits the emotional register of the genre.

This is one of the more musically interesting of the early Nippon Columbia records because the R&B material draws out different aspects of Inagaki's playing than the film-score and jazz-pop formats. He's more rhythmically direct here, the lines shorter and more punchy, anticipating the funk approach he would develop more fully in later years.

All About R&B is a minor record but a revealing one. The seeds of the mid-seventies funk work are visible here in the rhythmic approach and the preference for groove over elaboration. It's the early Nippon Columbia album most worth revisiting in light of what came after.

Beatles covers were a staple of Japanese commercial jazz in the late sixties, and Denon gave Inagaki the standard format: a studio orchestra, a rhythm section, and a program of Beatles hits rendered with the tenor saxophone taking the melodic role. The results are predictably pleasant and equally predictably safe.

The choice of Beatles material actually serves Inagaki reasonably well: the harmonic structures of many of the songs are simple enough that he can ornament them without losing the audience, and complex enough that his improvisations don't sound purely decorative. 'Yesterday' and the ballads in particular give him space to work.

Beatles Hit! Hit! is what it is: a commercial cash-in on the most bankable name in popular music, executed professionally by a musician who was capable of much more and would eventually prove it. The historical interest is in hearing how the Beatles' material filtered through the specific sensibility of Japanese jazz.

Head Rock represents Nippon Columbia's attempt to capitalize on the jazz-rock fusion trend that was transforming American jazz in 1970. The results have the slightly uncertain quality of a label following a trend without fully understanding it: the rhythmic foundation is more rock-inflected, the horn arrangements bolder, but the overall feel is still more commercial than experimental.

Inagaki sounds engaged by the heavier rhythmic approach in a way he didn't always on the film-score and standards dates. The energy level is higher, the playing more aggressive, and there are passages where the combination of his tenor attack and the rhythm section's momentum generates something genuinely exciting.

Head Rock is more interesting as a document of Japanese jazz responding to American fusion than as a standalone musical statement, but within those terms it's better than you'd expect. The title track in particular has a drive that the more cautious earlier records lacked.

Woodstock Generation is another response to American cultural events of the period, a tribute album to the festival and the broader moment. The material draws from the Woodstock soundtrack and related rock hits, filtered through Inagaki's tenor and a studio arrangement that softens the original material's edge.

There's an interesting historical dimension to this record as a document of how American counterculture was received and processed in Japan: the music reaches across the Pacific as a product before it arrives as an idea, and the Japanese jazz world's response was to assimilate it formally while keeping its own rhythmic and emotional character.

The playing here is a step up from the earlier covers records, partly because the rock-influenced material draws out more from Inagaki's jazz-rock band feel. It's still commercial but with more energy and less of the easy-listening gloss that characterized the 1969 recordings.

The Burt Bacharach songbook, organized around the Dionne Warwick hit that provides the album's title, is the material here: melodically rich, harmonically sophisticated, and well suited to a jazz-inflected treatment. Bacharach's melodies have a built-in tension between their pop accessibility and their harmonic complexity that makes them more interesting for jazz musicians than most of the pop material Nippon Columbia had been sending Inagaki's way.

The arrangements are generous, giving Inagaki's tenor room to develop the lines past the original melodies, and he takes that room more often than on the straight covers dates. The harmonic sophistication of Bacharach's writing demands a response beyond simple melodic decoration, and Inagaki provides it.

Do You Know The Way To San Jose? is one of the better Nippon Columbia records for listeners who don't need the material to be jazz originals. The songs are strong, the playing is more engaged than on the generic covers dates, and the overall production has the polish of a label that understood how to make this kind of record well.

Rock-A-Billy Revival is an outlier in the Nippon Columbia catalogue: a rockabilly-themed jazz record. The premise is more eclectic than most of the covers records, and the results are correspondingly more varied.

Inagaki's tenor is a more unusual voice in the rockabilly context than in the soul or pop settings, and the friction between his jazz phrasing and the genre's rhythmic conventions generates some unexpected moments. The record doesn't always hold together, but it takes more chances than the more straightforwardly commercial dates.

Rock-A-Billy Revival is for the completist, but it's an interesting failure rather than a boring success: a musician and a label trying something genuinely different, not entirely pulling it off, and being more interesting for the attempt.

A various-artists double LP drawn from the concert of 30 April 1970 at Shibuya Public Hall, on which Jiro Inagaki & His Soul Media play one of the eight tracks, Score. The playing is more expansive, the improvisations longer and more committed, the rhythm section more engaged. A live audience does things to a jazz musician that a studio microphone doesn't.

Inagaki's tenor playing has a presence that the careful studio recordings occasionally muffled.

Score, Inagaki's single track on Sensational Jazz '70: Vol. 1/2, is the best argument in the early Nippon Columbia period for Inagaki as a jazz musician rather than a commercial commodity. Remove him from the studio formula and put him in front of people who came to hear him play, and he responds accordingly.

Tenor Sax is a standards date for Nippon Columbia: The Shadow of Your Smile, Charade, Tenderly, Manhattan, Yesterday, Harlem Nocturne, Moonglow, Summertime, Moon River, Fly Me To The Moon, My Foolish Heart and Danny Boy.

The rhythm section here is tighter and more specifically jazz-oriented than on the covers records, and Inagaki responds with his most confident playing of the period. The ballads in particular benefit from the more intimate arrangement: his tone settles into something deeper and warmer than the busier studio productions allowed.

The record isn't the breakthrough that the early-seventies recordings would represent, but it's a clear step in that direction.

The Latin influence on Japanese jazz of the early seventies was stronger than is often acknowledged, and Quad Dimension / Rock'n Latin is a good example of it: a single quadraphonic LP shared between J. Inagaki & His Soul Media and the Tokyo Cuban Boys under T. Misago, arranged by T. Ogawa, sitting between jazz, rock and Latin music without quite being any of them.

The approach suits Inagaki well. The rhythmic complexity of the Latin foundation gives him more to work with than the straight-ahead swing of the earlier Nippon Columbia dates, and the result is some of his most rhythmically adventurous playing from this period. The uptempo tracks in particular have a forward momentum that the more melodically oriented records lacked.

Quad Dimension / Rock'n Latin is one of the more underrated records in the early Inagaki catalogue. The Latin-jazz-rock hybrid it explores is genuinely interesting as a musical concept, and Inagaki's execution is better here than the commercial context suggests it should be.