Kiba Ôkaminosuke Samurai Wolf (1966)

Jimmy Smith & Oliver Nelson - Peter & The Wolf (1966) {Verve by Request Series, 547 264-2 rel 1999}
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© 1966, 1999 Verve / PolyGram | 547 264-2
Jazz / Classical / Hard Bop / Soul Jazz / Modern Arrangement

Yeah this is another album there Jimmy Smith is working with Oliver Nelson and his orchestra, and this album is based on Serge Prokofiev's Peter & The Wolf and the first four minutes is the Prokofiev music, but the rest is credit to the great Oliver Nelson and he even wrote about it in the liner notes too, yeah this is nice piece of music written by the fantastic Oliver Nelson based upon the feeling that Prokofiev once provide.

In the mid-'60s, Chess Records released a great series of compilations of '40s and '50s singles by some of its best blues artists, all of them called The Real Folk Blues. The Howlin' Wolf entry is possibly the best of the batch, and one of the best introductions to this mercurial electric bluesman. Opening with the savage "Killing Floor," the album doesn't let up in intensity, and it happily focuses on Wolf's less-anthologized sides, which gives the album a freshness a lot of blues compilations lack. From the sly "Built for Comfort" and "Three Hundred Pounds of Fun" to the apocalyptic "Natchez Burning," every track is pure Chicago blues at its finest. The album's only flaws are its skimpy 32-minute running length and the inexplicable omission of perhaps Wolf's greatest single, the amazing "How Many More Years."

The Real Folk Blues series on Chess wasn't really folk, but titled that way, perhaps to gain the attention of young white listeners who had started to get turned on to the blues during the 1960s folk revival. And the Howlin' Wolf volumes in the series were not particularly more folk-oriented than his other Chess recordings, but more or less arbitrary selections of tracks that he'd done from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s. It's thus also arbitrary to do a two-fer reissue of his The Real Folk Blues and More Real Folk Blues, combined here onto a single disc. That doesn't mean, though, that this isn't very good and sometimes great electric blues music. The Real Folk Blues, with tracks from 1956 to 1965, is by far the more modern of the pair in arrangements, and has a good share of classics: "Killing Floor," "Sittin' on Top of the World," "Built for Comfort," "Tail Dragger," and "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy".

In the mid-'60s, Chess Records released a great series of compilations of '40s and '50s singles by some of its best blues artists, all of them called The Real Folk Blues. The Howlin' Wolf entry is possibly the best of the batch, and one of the best introductions to this mercurial electric bluesman. Opening with the savage "Killing Floor," the album doesn't let up in intensity, and it happily focuses on Wolf's less-anthologized sides, which gives the album a freshness a lot of blues compilations lack. From the sly "Built for Comfort" and "Three Hundred Pounds of Fun" to the apocalyptic "Natchez Burning," every track is pure Chicago blues at its finest. The album's only flaws are its skimpy 32-minute running length and the inexplicable omission of perhaps Wolf's greatest single, the amazing "How Many More Years."

Recorded in the midst of 1966, naturally after the spring release of their debut but before "Pushin' Too Hard" climbed into the national charts in the spring of 1967, A Web of Sound finds the Seeds pushing their sound into new dimensions, happily keeping pace with their Los Angeles contemporaries Love and the Doors. That the Seeds never received the respect accorded to their peers, either then or now, may be partially due to their lack of lyrical ambition, or it could be due to the Hollywood teenage sleaze that seeped out of this quartet led by garage rock icon Sky Saxon. Whatever the Seeds did, it sounded somewhat dirty, a maxim that applies to A Web of Sound even if it lacks singles as hard and filthy as "Pushin' Too Hard"…

Sophisticated Lady (1962). "Sophisticated" is the right word to describe Julie London's cool vocal approach; it can be shoved into the background, but if you listen closely there's a lot of turmoil going on under its seemingly calm surface. Similar to Chet Baker's unruffled way with a lyric, London's self-described "thimble full of a voice" ends up describing how pain hasn't quite iced over all her emotions rather than proving how unfeeling she is. Also like Baker, so many of her best recordings are steeped in the style and mood of laid-back West Coast jazz. Sophisticated Lady is one of a string of records London cut in the early '60s with less of a jazz feel than most of her sessions from the '50s, but it's still a worthy album. If it's not exactly an essential session, it is a good one, and the backing orchestra is to blame for the album's shortcomings - not the vocalist…

Following TSOP's first Omnibus box set subtitled "The Early Years" from 2018, this new set contains the albums On We Sail (2017), Archiviarum (2018), Toki No Kaze (2019) and Beyond the Wardrobe (2020) with five bonus tracks.
A must for the festive period when one can spoil one-self, beautiful presentation mini LP style card box sleeve package with extensive booklet as ever by Ed Unitsky. 4 disc with bonus tracks, symphonic prog of the highest quality. Limited issue so don't miss out.

Mickey Curtis was born of English parents in Tokyo, Japan in 1938. After the end of The World War II he lived by singing in the Occupation Forces or Camps, and as a result he was approved as a rockabilly singer. Although he had been an active pop singer and a frontman of two chorus-pop outfits named 'City Crows' and 'Vanguards' in mid 60s, he was awakened to rock suddenly and finally formed Samurai (The Samurais in their early days) in 1967. During the first two years Samurai made a lot of gigs and released two albums - "Tenor Sax Of Love" (1968; as The Samurais) and "Samurai" (1970) - in Europe. In early 1969 their soundscape was completely shifted to progressive rock, and we can easily realize the fact especially in their eponymous album…