Jiro Inagaki

Jazz Rock Legend appears in 2013 as a CD in Nippon Columbia's Dig Deep Columbia x Deep Jazz Reality reissue series, 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. Yusuke Ogawa's selection and notes treat the legacy period with appropriate care.

Vol. 0 is not an earlier instalment but a second helping from the same night: Nippon Columbia issued it in 2015 from unreleased tapes of the April 30, 1970 Sensational Jazz '70 concert at Shibuya Kokaido, the concert that also produced Vol. 2. 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. Inagaki gets one number here, "The Vamp (Jiro Inagaki & His Soul Media)"; the album's other three tracks are by Takeshi Inomata & Sound L.T.D., Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalos and Toshiyuki Miyama & His New Herd.

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 Nippon Columbia 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, timed to his ninetieth birthday on October 3 and issued months before his death in January 2024. The selection spans the 1968 to 1980 golden age, mostly Soul Media in its various billings but also Jiro Inagaki & The All-Stars and Jiro Inagaki & His Friends.

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 career that ran from his high school years to his death in 2024 and 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.