Jiro Inagaki

Something is another Beatles-adjacent record, this one organized around George Harrison's most celebrated song and extended to cover the wider early-seventies pop landscape. The format is familiar by this point: Inagaki's tenor as the melodic lead over studio orchestrations aimed at the pop-jazz crossover market.

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 CBS/Sony 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 CBS/Sony 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 CBS/Sony catalogue, makes the record feel different from its predecessors.

Wandering Birds suggests that by 1971 Inagaki was either negotiating more creative control from CBS/Sony or simply being given less constrained briefs on certain sessions. Either way, it points toward the more artistically ambitious work of 1972-73 in a way that most of the earlier records don't.

Dock of My Mind is named after a riff on Otis Redding's classic, and 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 CBS/Sony 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 CBS/Sony years: the first side jazz-pop material, the second side exploring the reggae and rock steady rhythms that were beginning to filter into Japanese pop culture in the early seventies. The combination is more musically interesting than it sounds on paper.

The reggae-influenced tracks on the second side are the surprising revelation: Inagaki's tenor over a genuine reggae groove is an unexpectedly compelling combination, the saxophone's jazz phrasing working well against the one-drop rhythm in a way that anticipates the funk hybrid 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 CBS/Sony probably didn't fully intend to encourage.

Another hit covers record, this one drawing from the Japanese and American charts of 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 includes both Japanese and imported material, and the differences in how Inagaki approaches the two is subtly revealing.

By this point in the CBS/Sony 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.

Let It Be revisits the Beatles material two years after the commercial peak of the genre in Japan, this time organized around the final Beatles album and its associated singles. The timing is slightly retrospective: the Beatles had already broken up and Let It Be the film had been released. CBS/Sony was working a seam they knew well.

The title track is the centerpiece, and Inagaki's reading is among his more thoughtful ballad treatments of the period: the simplicity of McCartney's melody gives him less to work with harmonically, but the emotional register of the song draws out a more straightforward expressiveness than the more complex pop material often did.

Let It Be is a stronger record than most of the other Beatles-themed releases because the source material is itself more emotionally direct. The farewell quality of the original album comes through in Inagaki's playing in ways that are more affecting than a commercial covers record has any right to be.

Dosojin is the record where Inagaki finally breaks free of the commercial covers format and makes a genuine jazz statement. Released on Nippon Columbia rather than CBS/Sony, it signals the shift in both label and ambition. 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.

Named after the traditional Japanese deity of roads and travelers, 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 the move to Nippon Columbia let it happen at all.

Play New Hits is the CBS/Sony formula record that followed 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 CBS/Sony 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 the second of the 1972 CBS/Sony records that represents Inagaki's own voice rather than the covers format, and the title perfectly captures its character: music that is simultaneously rough in its directness and elegant in its execution. The material is original, the arrangements spare, and the playing consistently strong.

The album has a tougher quality than Dosojin, the rhythm section more aggressive and the tenor playing more abrasive. Inagaki sounds like a musician who has spent three years playing commercial material and is finally getting to say something he means, and the energy of that release is audible throughout.

Rough & Elegance and Dosojin together form the real artistic statement of the CBS/Sony years: two different aspects of Inagaki's mature voice, one introspective and Japanese-rooted, the other extrovert and jazz-driven. They're the records to know from this period.

The last of the CBS/Sony commercial records covered here, 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 its final, most 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 closes the CBS/Sony chapter with a record that is pleasant without being interesting. What follows it, on different labels and with more creative freedom, would make the commercial years feel like a chrysalis: necessary, constraining, and eventually left behind.