Masahiko Satoh, Part 4 (Belladonna 1975, Electro Keyboard Orchestra 1975, Multispheroid 1977, YaKsa 1985, Twilight Monologues 1984, Silky Adventure 1986)

I post all of these after Christmas and the three other M. Satoh packages, amassing together essentially some leftover albums which range from a bit more disappointing to a lot more disappointing-- kind of like the guilt of looking at your credit card statement after the binge buying of Christmas sales and Black Friday, or like looking at the expensive presents your extended family, hopefully not close family, wasted money on that you will hide away in a mothball-filled closet for the rest of eternity and never look at again. Gotta hate your mother in law, even if there weren't a million other reasons, just for that awful tendency of buying the worst Xmas presents.  (And for myself, for Xmas I'll once again pray my wife doesn't look at this blog.)

Going through it quickly, to minimize the discomfort brought on by this wide-bore needle injection unfortunately medically necessary for your survival, the soundtrack Belladonna from 1975 is totally and completely by the numbers OST/library stuff, I almost want to write him a letter to say, 'what were you thinking; why couldn't you come up with better music?  Why can't you be more like Morricone?? Or your compatriot Jun Fukamachi???'  Like we say to our kids.  The track called Mr. London gives you an idea, once again, bearing in mind this is the best composition:

On the 1975 keyboard album called Electro Keyboard Orchestra, wherein he is accompanied by 7 other pianists including our old fave Yuji Ohno (note there were several Ohno posts back then on this blog, what wonderful music that was), there is some delightful fusion here and there, witness Mother of the Future:





Note that this track surprisingly was written by Carlos Garnett.  His original rendition and album were garbage, if I recall correctly.

Moving right along to the next big bowtied box of nuthin', we have the piano improvisation called Multi-Spheroid etc., which on top of being purely solo grand piano, is completely extemporized in a non-key or atonal manner with nothing at all familiar to cling to (unless you're one of those third world children of the garbage dumps that lives on top of a pile of refuse).  As usual it amazes me that this kind of 'music' would be put out as a real LP back in the day, when better music is thrown out as 'tax scam releases' and never sees the light.  Absolutely deplorable.  And unlistenable.  The best thing is without a doubt the artwork that graces the album, which entranced me for quite some time, trying to understand what it was all about.  Have a look at it above.

Then Twilight Monologues features 4 pianists, again on solo acoustic, again uselessly boring.  Please, give me back the ten minutes I wasted on this, or I will break the record over your heads, you four.  Get back over here, you wimps.  The album from 1986 with bamboo flute player Yamamoto (we saw him too before here) is piano plus bamboo, and surely you are begging for a couple of giant pandas to eat all of his bamboo instruments to relieve you from this torture by the time you get to the end.  Although, instead of free atonal garbage, we are dealing here with simplistic folktune-like garbage.  A familiar thing to those children of the dumps.  The Iberian track at least is good:





And that leaves us with Yaksa, another OST, from 1985 this time.  Here it's Toots Thielemans (on harmonica of course and as usual) who is accompanying Satoh and the music is at least approachable and occasionally interesting, though once again he falls into the death-trap trash compactor of simplistic composition, so unlike the packages 1-3 in our pre-Christmas Satoh Special.  In fact, where the hell did all the good music go, oh-Satoh-San????

It's unfortunate in particular that the theme song sung by Nancy Wilson, which resembles the James Bond songs, is so disappointing.  For example the Prologue starts so promising, quite Dave Grusin-like in sound, and then when Toots tries to get in on the action, it becomes reduced to the worst sort of big band / library jazz track from the standard American jazz bin:





It's like you want to slap him on his back while he's playing his harmonica so he swallows it by accident, or it gets stuck in his mouth like the stick the road runner put in the coyote's mouth that keeps his jaw open so he can't play any chords anymore except G7 and C while breathing in and out.

So obviously I won't be pursuing any more Masahiko Satoh, and we will just try to remember those glorious albums that were so full of creative and wonderful ideas and so progressive in their melding of jazz and classical with electric instrumental energy: All in-All out, Chagall, Amorphism, and the two Medical Sugar Banks.

I'll continue in the next couple of weeks with some more fantastic Japanese progressive music that was totally new to me, maybe not to you.