Tuesday, 31 March 2026

Requested Albums Part 2: Samurai 1970 and Kappa 1971

 








Wow, what a gorgeous cover painting for the second album, Kappa!  Incredibly beautiful and dramatically colorful with the pink / grey / blue skeletal griffon (?) crucifixion. Note on the verso, the fish-topped plant (?). The cover this time is by this guy, no other credits apart from Samurai.  Sometimes, as I've said so often before, an album is worth finding just for the cover art.  It's the case here.

This appropriately Japanese Samurai is not to be confused with the much more famous British band of course, that one too with an unforgettably beautiful cover painting, and that one too released in the same year of 1971. 

The discogs description this time oddly enough is both useful and accurate:

Samurai was a prog/hard rock band active in the late 60s/early 70s. Not to be confused with the british band Samurai (6) renamed from The Web , this group was started by rockabilly singer/actor Miki Curtis along with fellow Japanese and European musicians, creating a mix of hard rock, psych, prog and Japanese folk. In their time of activity they made two albums...
They went to Europe in late 1967, picking up some European members and thus becoming half-Japanese. In London they recorded in 1970 a single and their debut album, the double-LP Samurai aka Miki Curtis & Samurai, as well as a single only released in Italy (1969). Their 2nd album "Green Tea" (1971) was simply a single-LP repackaging of the debut only released in Japan, to where the band had returned. In 1971, the band released "Kappa". The band played a varied kind of psychedelic progressive rock, occasionally a bit hard-rocking, with jazzy and exotic Asian touches and a 22-minute closing jam. They've been compared by Vernon Joyson to Andwella's Dream and early Traffic. The bassist, Tetsu Yamauchi, later played in Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu & Rabbit , Free and The Faces, as well as pursuing a brief solo career. Drummer Yujin Harada later played in the last incarnation of Far East Family Band.

And I guess Far East FB is quite similar musically.  The first album from 1970 with the Kabuki maekup cover is straight simple blues rock sung in English, of course.  Green Tea:



From the second album which is slightly more progressive but minimally so-- more psych jammy to my ears, Trauma:





1 comment:



  1. both albums

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