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:

Requested Albums Part 1: Genuine John (1970), Tetsu Yamauchi in 3 (1972 to 1976)

 

Again some wonderful cover art, the head of John the Baptist represents Genuine John. (Cover art by Fred Marcellino.)  You can see this is a one-off LP from 1970.  It's wholly blues rock, as you will correctly conclude from my sample, the instrumental Inside Out:

Moving on to bassist Tetsu Yamauchi:

Tetsu Yamauchi (山内 テツ, Yamauchi Tetsu; 21 October 1946 in Fukuoka, Japan – 4 December 2025) was a Japanese musician. In the 1970s, he was a member of several popular rock bands, including Free, where he replaced original bassist Andy Fraser before the band's final album Heartbreaker, and Faces, where he replaced Ronnie Lane and appears on the band's final single, "You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything", as well as touring with them and playing on the live album Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners. He also recorded various solo albums and did extensive work as a session musician before retiring from the music sometime in the late 1990s.

How sad to note he passed away last Dec.

Sammy's Allright from the 1970 collab album, which is eminently approachable and listenable, basically classic mild-rock ssw stuff (think early 70s Rod Stewart type stuff, Badfinger):

In the end this record which is basically the British band Free, plus Tatsu as fill-in bassist, is the best of the 3 here, perhaps because of the strength of composition from the Free members, that is Simon Kirke, Paul Kossoff, keyboardist "Rabbit".  Surprising to me that it's better than any Free album though, so far as I can tell, both in the quality of the songs and the stretching past ordinary rock chord progressions (I mean like I IV V).

From the first solo Yamauchi, 1972's Tetsu, in my not so humble opinion the best composition is Alexander Stone, with its lushly oceanic hammond organ rolling in the warm surf in the left channel, the female vocals here are by [?] no one bothered to update the discogs page with credits:

Plus a lot of groovy funky bluesy numbers, along the lines of sometimes just 2-3 chords per song.

The 1976 album Kikyou, again minimal credits info, sounds like the intervening half decade had never happened, with the same early 1970s British blues-rock ssw songs.  There is barely any hint of prog rock despite the silly description as such on the discogs page.  I am not sure what their idea of prog is but it's not mine.  Rather it's a mix of country/folk/blues/plain rock.

The River has a nice pipes of pan intro (always a surprise to make that statement), augmented by the electric arpeggios and dual acoustic rhythm guitars:

So the arranging is beautiful, and reminiscent of the classic rock hits of an earlier era.  Enjoyable records though altogether, and little to barely known at all.

Kazuhiro Miyatake Part 2: Pazzo Fanfano di Musica and Hirayama's Symphonia

 

Inevitably one album or artist leads to another.    Following the database information for the composer Miyatake, I saw he was in other bands separate from Mr. Sirius and Pageant.

The band called  Pazzo Fanfano di Musica presumably as a homage or tribute to the classics of Italian prog (Paese dei Balocchi, PFM, Celeste, etc.) is a one-off from 1989 which I enjoyed quite a bit, though it's neither as good as Mr. Sirius nor, of course, those aforementioned old Italians. Flowers for Algernon, which novelette I've mentioned before I loved as a child (probably would hate it now as I get closer and closer to inevitable dementia):

So as you can tell, mix of symphonic with a lot of classical, baroque elements thrown in, perhaps recalling mostly Maxophone from the old days-- not as good of course.

Teru's Symphonia:

Japanese symphonic progressive rock band founded in Osaka, Japan in 1983 and disbanded in 1999.

Amazingly, they put out 7 albums so far.  

This is the one from 1994, with involvement by Miyatake. Same style as Pageant to my ear.  Friday the 13th:

Kazuhiro Miyatake Part 1: Pageant

Keyboardist / Composer Kazuhiro Miyatake is the mastermind or leader of my overall favourite Japanese band, Mr. Sirius (apart from Bi Kyo Ran that is).  He was also in Mugen which followed after.  I love Mr. Sirius to death: it's the classic-prog old-school inimitable Genesis Symphonic style with a highly impressive and agreeable mix of classical music and rock sounds perfectly intertwined.  

I didn't realize that late in the 1980s he created another band called Pageant who then went on to put out a handful of CDs, last one in 1994 it seems.  Unfortunately the subsequent band, very much in the Mugen symphonic style, has less of the crazy creativity one finds in the original Mr. Sirius from 1987 and Barren Dream, I'm not sure why, since it's still just Miyatake as composer, as the time period in question is roughly the same.

From the 1987 album of the same name, the lovely female vocals of Kamen no Egao:

Lapis Lazuli from 1989's Pay for Dreamer's Sin:

Kehell's Galileo [FLAC limited time]

 

A one-off from this band, released in 1999-- so long ago already.  Not much in the database here.  But you can see this is the creation of the guitarist from Mr. Sirius, called Shigekazu Kamaki who was also in the 1983 symphonic one-off opus Orpheus.

It's quite consistently good from beginning to the end, the style being the same instrumental symphonic prog we have heard so much of lately.  From the track called Prologue - Behind the Earth you can get a sense of how interesting the music is, featuring varied instrumentation, modulations, odd rhythms, all the usual accoutrements of classic prog:

Same remarks can surely apply to a track called Paranoid:

At times the music feels derivative and monotonous, failings of so much of the latter-day prog I hate to say.  Still I would argue it's above average for this genre from this decade.