Jiro Inagaki

Something is another Beatles-adjacent record, this one organized around George Harrison's most celebrated song, with the rest of the album given over to two extended Masahiko Satoh originals, Fairy Rings and Serenity. The format is not the familiar one: Inagaki shares the front line with the American saxophonist Steve Marcus over a small group arranged by Masahiko Satoh, and Discogs files the result as fusion, avant-garde jazz and free jazz.

Harrison's harmonic sensibility translates better to jazz treatment than most of the Beatles catalogue, and the title track is one of Inagaki's better commercial performances: the melody is strong enough to support genuine embellishment, and he makes more of the changes than the lighter pop material usually invited.

Something is competent and occasionally more than that, but it's clearly a product of the Nippon Columbia formula rather than a personal statement. The formula was getting tired by 1971, and you can hear Inagaki beginning to strain against it in the more directly jazz-oriented tracks.

Wandering Birds is the Nippon Columbia record where Inagaki's jazz instincts most clearly overwhelm the commercial format. The material is more original, the arrangements less orchestrally cushioned, and the improvisations more extended and more genuinely exploratory than anything on the covers records.

The title track has a searching quality that distinguishes it from the earlier material: Inagaki plays as if he isn't sure where the tune is going and is genuinely interested in finding out. That quality, rare in the Nippon Columbia catalogue, makes the record feel different from its predecessors.

Wandering Birds is a looser and more open session than the covers records around it, though no source documents any change in Inagaki's arrangement with Nippon Columbia.

The soul influence is more evident here than on the earlier R&B-themed records. The rhythm section has a heaviness that the 1969 recordings lacked, and Inagaki's tenor playing is correspondingly more muscular.

The record sits at the intersection of the soul covers format and the more original direction Inagaki was moving toward. Some tracks feel like genuine jazz interpretations; others are straightforward commercial adaptations. The inconsistency is part of the transitional nature of this period in his career.

Dock of My Mind is most interesting as a document of the period between the Nippon Columbia pop-jazz formula and the soul jazz breakthrough that was coming. The groove elements are getting stronger, the jazz content more serious, and the tension between the two is almost audible in the arrangement choices.

This double-concept record is one of the more unusual entries in the Nippon Columbia years: the first side jazz-pop material, the second side built around American soul covers, opening with Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady and Day Dreaming. The combination is more musically interesting than it sounds on paper.

The second side is the surprising part: Soul Media and the Columbia Pops Orchestra behind Sammy on Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady and Day Dreaming, a funk-soul setting that anticipates the harder grooves of the mid-seventies.

Woman, Robinson Crusoe / Rock Steady is a transitional curiosity that rewards the curious listener. It doesn't succeed on every track, but the second side in particular shows Inagaki willing to cross genre lines in ways that Nippon Columbia probably didn't fully intend to encourage.

Another hit covers record, this one drawing entirely from the Anglo-American and European charts of 1971 and 1972. The format is by now very familiar: Inagaki's tenor as lead voice over studio arrangements that aim for the pop-jazz crossover market. The execution is reliably professional.

New Hits Explosion is of more historical than musical interest: a snapshot of what was popular in Japan in 1972 and how the jazz community processed it. The selection is entirely imported, running from Ringo Starr and Wings to Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon and the Carpenters.

By this point in the Nippon Columbia catalogue, the formula had become almost mechanical, and the more interesting musical questions were being addressed on the records where Inagaki had more creative control. New Hits Explosion is the formula at its most automatic.

Dosojin is the record where Inagaki finally breaks free of the commercial covers format and makes a genuine jazz statement. Released on Nippon Columbia, the same label as the commercial dates around it, it signals a shift in ambition rather than in label. The material is Japanese in origin, the arrangements are jazz-oriented rather than pop-orchestral, and the playing has an urgency and commitment that the earlier records approached only occasionally and in glimpses.

The record has a conceptual coherence the earlier recordings lacked: this is music with a Japanese identity rather than a Japanese processing of American or British material. The compositions draw on both jazz and Japanese folk sources without compromising either. Yasushi Sawada's vocals root the record in Japanese tradition while Inagaki's saxophone pushes it into jazz territory.

Dosojin is the record worth knowing for its own sake rather than as a stepping stone. It announces an artistically serious Inagaki that the commercial years had largely kept under wraps, and it makes the listener grateful that Nippon Columbia let it happen at all.

Play New Hits is the Nippon Columbia formula record made alongside Dosojin, which makes the contrast particularly stark. The label clearly had two parallel tracks for Inagaki: the artistically ambitious work that produced Dosojin, and the commercial work that produced records like this one. Both were happening simultaneously.

The material is another set of chart hits treated to the standard jazz-pop arrangement, and Inagaki plays them with his usual professionalism. After Dosojin, however, the limitations of the format are more visible than before: you can hear a musician who knows what he's capable of and is being asked to operate well below that level.

Play New Hits is the most dispensable entry in the Nippon Columbia catalogue, not because the playing is bad but because the context is most constraining. It's the record that makes you most grateful that the label also gave Inagaki the space to make Dosojin.

Rough & Elegance is a 1972 Denon covers date, and the title captures its character: music that is simultaneously rough in its directness and elegant in its execution. The material is drawn from current pop, film and show hits, the arrangements are by H. Suzuki, and the playing is consistently strong.

The album has a tougher quality than Dosojin, the rhythm section more aggressive and the tenor playing more abrasive.

Dosojin is the real artistic statement of these Nippon Columbia years, with Rough & Elegance its extrovert commercial counterpart on the Denon side of the same company. Both are worth hearing from this period.

Released in March 1972, Tenorsax Fancy Mood is a polished easy-listening date that draws on the full range of the format's techniques. Lush arrangements, familiar material, Inagaki's tenor in the melodic lead: the formula in a refined incarnation.

There's a weariness to this record that you don't quite hear on the earlier ones, as if both the musician and the label knew they had exhausted this particular approach. The playing is professional and occasionally lovely, but the creative energy had clearly moved elsewhere by this point.

Tenorsax Fancy Mood is pleasant without being interesting. What followed it later the same year, on the same Nippon Columbia group of labels and with more creative freedom, would make the commercial dates feel like a chrysalis: necessary, constraining, and eventually left behind.