Tee

The gang's all here: the in-demand New York session pros that fueled more hit records and seminal fusion cuts that anybody could accurately track down. And who knows how many tracks for TV commercials. Richard Tee came up from North Carolina and added a thick spread of Gospel to the collective sometimes billed as 'Stuff' (and sometimes not billed at all.) Every cut here climbs into a groove and rides.

"Tee" in Tee & Company is the nickname of Three Blind Mice's founder and producer Takeshi Fujii, who formed the all-star group of eight top Japanese jazz musicians in 1977 for a series of concerts and seven days of studio recording that produced three separate albums. This supergroup included who's who of the Japanese jazz scene: Kenji Mori and Takao Uematsu on saxophones, Masaru Imada on piano, Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, Hideto Kanai on bass, Nobuyoshi Ino on electric bass, Hiroshi Murakami on drums and Yuji Imamura on percussion. Fujii and the musicians at the time were pursuing jazz as a new art form and not just as commercial entertainment. This is an important historic document of the energy that jazz had in Japan in the late 1970s!

Richard Tee's "Inside You" was released in 1989 on columbia records and has been long out of print and very difficult to locate. If you are lucky enough to find a copy on E-Bay or through Amazon's used music network I would grab it. This cd is full of easy listening jazz/funk vocals and instrumentals that are done in typical Richard Tee keyboard cool jazz style. The cd gets ample support from an allstar studio team featuring: Tee on keyboards and vocals, Steve Gadd and Dave Weckl on drums, Marcus Miller on bass, Ralph MacDonald percussion, John Tropea on guitar, Lenny Pickett on sax and Patti Austin on backround vocals just to name a few. Highlights include "Louisiana Sunday Afternoon", "So Hard To Handle", "Will You Be There" and "Changes". It's a pleasure to listen to well played music by musicians who are not household names but are as talented as anyone in the industry.

TEE is a present Japanese band, made of five musicians on keyboards, flute, guitar, bass and drums. The second opus "Trans-Europe Expression" (2011) could have been a tribute to Kraftwerk, but the music featured here is quite different. The recipe of the first album has been kept and bettered, an instrumental brand of Progressive jazz-rock fusion cooked with patience and talent. Let's just notice a new ingredient added for good measure on the track "Intersection": female voices, melodic to the bone. Here are six long pieces, to be tasted with pure enjoyment only! The title of the third album, "Tales Of Eternal Entities" (2016), remains faithful to the three letters making TEE. Faithful also to the musical style, the construction of the album (Six instrumental pieces), and of course, to the superior quality level dear to the Japanese band.

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio - Blues For Tee (1974) {2014 Japan Three Blind Mice Mini LP Blu-spec CD Remaster}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 279 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 104 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 11 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1974, 2014 Three Blind Mice / Sony Music Direct (Japan) / Think! Records | THCD-316 / LP TBM-41
Jazz / Post Bop / Piano Trio

Three Blind Mice Blu-spec CD reissue series. Limited paper sleeve edition. Blues For Tee is the second of the three albums that came out of the legendary Christmas sessions at the Misty, a Tokyo jazz club, which took place on December 1974. The Three Blind Mice producer Takeshi "Tee" Fujii wanted to record Yamamoto before he left for the U.S. to study at Berklee School of Music, and almost all of the performances were so good that he decided to release three LPs instead of one that was originally planned.

Richard Tee appeared on more than 400 albums as a sideman, including longtime stints with Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin. It should be no surprise, then, that the music heard on this last album before his death in 1993 should have elements of soul, funk, and gospel. Real Time is what could be called a swaying album. It can be danced to, but the performances are so low-key and sincere that dancers would only have to stay in place and sway to the music. In addition to his usual spells on the piano and keyboards, Tee sings in a slow, soulful voice that adds to the peacefulness of the proceedings.