Takuro Okada – Konoma

You can always hear music in Steve Hiett’s photography. You can definitely hear the music on the cover of his solo debut, Down On The Road By The Beach. Heavily saturated with color, mesmerizingly flash-lit, and warmly off-center, this image was like an Edgar Degas painting come to life - albeit one fashioned with Miami’s South Beach in mind. That image, an Elle Française snapshot taken from his Japanese-released photo book also titled “Down On The Road By The Beach”, was intensely-colored Modernism as Pop Art. On Down On The Road By The Beach were those blues, heavily saturated (a trademark of Steve), within and outside the album. We may not know it, but modern, as in at this moment, fashion, and editorial photography owes a lot to the techniques Steve Hiett pioneered in the late 70s and 80s. Yet on this album cover, you’re getting just a peek at his talent.

The colossally popular Zatoichi films make up the longest-running action series in Japanese history and created one of the screen’s great heroes: an itinerant blind masseur who also happens to be a lightning-fast swordsman. As this iconic figure, the charismatic and earthy Shintaro Katsu became an instant superstar, lending a larger-than-life presence to the thrilling adventures of a man who lives staunchly by a code of honor and delivers justice in every town and village he enters. The films that feature him are variously pulse-pounding, hilarious, stirring, and completely off-the-wall. This deluxe set features the string of twenty-five Zatoichi films made between 1962 and 1973, collected in one package for the first time.

In the field of chamber music, César Franck is mainly remembered for his three mature masterpieces: the Violin Sonata, the Piano Quintet and the String Quartet.