Tony Koba's Rough and Smooth from 1981 Japan

Tony Koba's only album, from 1981, with a stellar lineup of Japanese all-stars including fellow percussionist Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami, the unfortunately named 'Pecker' (Masahito Hashida), Nobuyuki Shimizu, Toshiyuki Daitoku, Ken Watanabe... He was a friend of Jun Fukamachi, but sadly for us his friend didn't play on this album.

Track 2 called "Miracle of Tungus" to me presents an electric guitar riff that is almost a miracle of progressive fusion songwriting:





As the LP title might indicate there is a slightly bipolar (not schizophrenic) mixture of harder, edgier fusionoid material and fuzak silky smoothness, plus pop balladry a la George Benson, the latter of which are not entirely successful especially when compared with such official progressreview-discovery albums as Rainbow Chaser by Miyako Chaki or the Anli Sugano Shining Wave.

As an example of the smoothness on the bipolar spectrum, Summer Moon:





A wonderful lost LP and slice of Japanese early 80s fusion though, for sure.

More from Peter Patzer with Patterns

For some reason this album is slightly better, with more variation and invention than the prior post.  It's always great to be pleasantly surprised.  The Sunrise over Palatinate evokes Pink Floyd of course, possibly fully unintentionally:





A bit more experimental sounding is the imaginatively titled Klondyke and the Great Hope:

Library composer Peter Patzer with Straight Line

This composer made a string of interesting library records for the German Crea Music label, presumably sometime in the eighties.  The sound, with digital keyboards and eighties percussion, is very similar to my favourite Gianni Sposito, whose discography I am happy to relate I have now 'completed.'  The post I made last year of his album Sirens is another apparent favourite here with literally thousands of views.  Which is amazing, almost as amazing as the fact that those thousands of views led to one comment being posted.

Probably many are familiar with him thanks to the CD of commercials non-stop, which I hated.  This collection of material he made for Crea is much better written and runs over the gamut of library music, as you'd expect.  As an example I think the title track says it all:





I like the angular melody and the crafty organ interrupting it on Steel Forms in the Sand:





More to come from him shortly.

Jazz track, 4 albums

They made 4 albums from 1975 to 1979 all in the usual German fusion-contemporary jazz style, essentially interchangeably.  It's all very similar to the recently posted Open Music. From discogs:

German 1970's modern jazz and fusion combo based in Düsseldorf and Bremen. Members included Sigi Busch from Association P.C., and introducing the now really prolific Christoph Spendel. Also involved were Uli Beckerhoff and Wolfgang Engstfeld, later of Changes.  [Which was posted here before.  Also, C. Spendel was in the fabulous group called Chameleon posted earlier too.]


The first song off the first album, sounding very much like Attila Zoller:






Of course, on their last album they got bored of the instrumental contemporary jazz and cosmetically augmented themselves with the vocal histrionics of brit Norma Winstone, awarded a Member of the British Empire in 2007, an empire which, certainly, will be ultra-powerful and super-effective on its remaining miniscule tract of land thanks to the marvellous steering of those magnificent brexiteers.  God bless 'em for restricting themselves to the stranded limits of a tiny island.  And indeed we would do well to recall the old and perennial saying, "For the sun never shines on the british empire:"  tally-ho mates, and a good cuppa for your elevenses-- ya losers.

Esa Helasvuo almost compleat, with a rip of his 1985 previously unavailable Huomenna Sinä Tulet

A quick review of this Finnish musician/pianist I was reminded of, obviously, when going through Jazz-Liisa.  From discogs:

Born on March 9, 1945. A Finnish composer, arranger , pianist and lecturer.

Clearly his masterpiece was Think-Tank-Funk, a wonderful and poetic name simultaneously describing the intellectual quality of this music and satirizing those real-world intellectual exercises in futility, who I blame for almost tipping humanity into the hell of nuclear war thanks to their 'logical' appraisals of how a conflict against the USSR could be won by the US at the negligible cost of destroying human civilization (and their appraisals turned out to be mostly wrong, based on a form of game theory that was superseded by more sophisticated versions, a good example of how bad science is worse than no science at all).  Today the think tanks have found a wonderful new raison d'etre: to rationalize the crazed social experiments of politicians all over the world who want to validate their intuition that rich people ought to get richer, to hell with everything else ("burn baby burn").

Anyways I would expect almost anyone reading this to be familiar with the album.  The astonishing vocal track, Song for a Tube, a premonition/prediction of the rise of youtube from those wonderful think-tanks:





Moving through the discography, the next album from 1973 is clearly a children's album, no interest on my part in buying and ripping, while the 1976 ripped some years ago for our benefit by Mr. Morgan is an odd mix of vocal jazz, classical chamber, children's songs and simplistic pieces, the best ex. is this:





The 1974 is a solo piano album which is all over the place, and to me just impossible to like.  I can't for the life of me understand what happened to the brilliance of Think-Tank-Funk.  The best aspect of it is the cover painting, which is really gorgeous and worth looking at up close (you can see a good scan on discogs).  The 1977 Q is well known and deservedly famous, in fact, in its pure expression of the cool style of Finnish contemporary jazz.

Then of course we jump to today's entry, the 1985 vocal jazz album.  We see this repeatedly where a muscular progressive seventies spirit like in the 3 Edition Speciale LPs is neutered once we enter the 80s (Orchestra II).  Susanna was a Finnish actress who also made some vocal albums in the early 80s.
Overall, this sounds very much like the prior Ahlenvahti vocal LP I posted last month, relatively humdrum, no instrumentals, nothing fusiony.  All the compositions are by Esa.  Note that the other brilliant Esa, Kotilainen, appears here too, credited on the accordeon (!).  His Ajatuslapsi is one of my all-time favourite keyboard albums, and note that a CD release appeared recently with bonus tracks.  The last track has lyrics from an Edgar Allen Poe poem and the chords are correspondingly mysterious:





For a more positive experience, the first track has a relatively sweet buoyant sound to it; cowritten by the two principals:





Our wonderful friend also made a new lossless rip off a VG plus vinyl Q which I'll post below.