Jiro Inagaki

Jazz Rock Legend appears in 2013 as part of the retrospective packaging that Japanese labels were producing for the vinyl revival market, the Soul Media records having been rediscovered by a new generation of collectors and DJs in the intervening decades. The record compiles and contextualizes the most influential material from the peak period.

The reissue and compilation context gave Inagaki's work a new audience and a new legitimacy, the Soul Media records now discussed alongside the Three Blind Mice catalogue as essential documents of Japanese jazz. Jazz Rock Legend is part of that rehabilitation project, and it does its curatorial job well.

For collectors who already know the studio albums, Jazz Rock Legend offers modest additional material. For new listeners, it's a useful entry point that avoids the archival density of the full discography. The late-career engagement with the legacy period is appropriate and dignified.

The companion release to the 1970 live document, Vol. 0 presumably predates the Vol. 2 set in the original concert series and was kept in the archive until the vinyl revival created a market for it. As a document of Inagaki in live performance at the beginning of his most commercially productive period, it has genuine historical value.

The playing is as strong as on Vol. 2, Inagaki in front of an audience doing things he didn't do in the studio. The band is tight, the material is the familiar early-seventies mix of covers and originals, and the energy of the live setting produces the same lift it produced on the previously released document.

Sensational Jazz '70 Vol. 0 is a welcome companion to Vol. 2 and together the two live records provide the best document of Inagaki as a live performer in his commercial period: more engaged, more daring, and more himself than the CBS/Sony studio formula ever quite allowed.

The WaJazz Legends series, launched to document and celebrate Japanese jazz musicians for international audiences, gave Inagaki's work a definitive curatorial treatment in 2023, two years after his death. The selection focuses on the Soul Media period that represents his most original and lasting contribution.

The curation here is intelligent: the tracks chosen represent Inagaki at his best rather than his most commercial, the sequencing moves between the harder funk moments and the more lyrical soul jazz material, and the overall presentation gives new listeners the clearest possible picture of what made the Soul Media records so important.

WaJazz Legends: Jiro Inagaki is the appropriate final word on a fifty-year career that was more varied and more artistically serious than its commercial beginnings suggested. It's a fitting legacy document for a musician whose best work deserves to be heard long after the vinyl revival that initially brought it back into circulation.