Ura Tmahime Jun Togawa

Vladimir Martynov’s Utopia Symphony is a musical tribute to Singapore from a son of the Russian avant-garde of the 1970s. Martynov skillfully combines influences from American minimalism and Russian Orthodox chant with a libretto inspired by the ancient text of the Tao Te Ching to create a sound world which seeks to reimagine the concept of utopia. This world premiere recording was made at London’s Abbey Road Studios, under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski.

Keyboardist Jun Fukamachi did this LP in 1978 on the Kitty label, personnel is Jun Fukamachi on keyboards, Richard Tee on piano, Gordon Edwards, Anthony Jackson and Tony Levin on bass, Steve Gadd, Howard King, Ponta s. Murakami and Chris Parker on drums, Cornell Dupree, Steve Khan, Barry Finnerty and Eric Gale on guitar, Ernie Watts and Lou Marini on sax, Randy Brecker on trumpet, Barry Rogers on trombone and Crusher Bennett on percussion.

Might you have a reliable original edition of Modest Mussorgsky’s «Pictures at an Exhibition» for piano, that I could borrow? The request was made by Maurice Ravel in February 1922 to his friend «Calvo», full name Michel Dimitri Calvoressi, a Marseille-born British music critic and author with Greek roots. In the letter Ravel went so far as to underline the words «édition originale de Moussorgsky». So at least as far back as Ravel we have had this problem, one that Jun Märkl is even today all too aware of: the quest for the original Mussorgsky has always been difficult. Back then, Calvo was clearly unable to help the composer. Ravel, who had been delighted to receive a commission from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky for an instrumental arrangement of the piano cycle, had to content himself with the edition published in 1886, after Mussorgsky’s death, under the aegis of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov – a version we now know to contain a number of corrections, typos and printing errors. The reasons for this can be found in the personal fate of the composer and in the well-meaning and in some cases essential retrospective editing of his oeuvre.

Recorded at Seibu Theatre, Tokyo (June 3rd and 4th 1977). This album packs a wallop! Lots of outstanding music and playing from everyone in the group - Jun Fukamachi, Randy & Michael Brecker contributing songs from the Brecker Bros albums. The 2CD set is a must - the song Triangle Session is actually a note for note cover of John Lee & Gerry Brown's song Rise On from the recently reissued album Still Can't Say Enough that the Brecker Bros played -recommended along with the companion album Mango Sunrise! Kenji Ohmura nails the guitar on this song and the whole performance. The drummer, Martin Willweber, and bassist Kenji Takamizu are also excellent.

Jun Kamikubo was an obscure musician who released one record in small quantity, 'Nothingness' [Express, 1972]. Completely unknown and amazing album, only released in Japan as a very small pressing, really screaming fuzz guitar and great vocals. One of the best Japanese underground albums of all times. Reissued on LP in a strictly limited edition (350 copies) The album has been reissued on LP by Shadoks, and more recently on CD by Toshiba-EMI.

In America the golden season for music festivals ended up in late '69 with the Altamont's accidents, a few months after Woodstock. In the early seventies in Europe there was still space for some "good vibrations", as proved by the Kralingen Pop festival, near Rotterdam, on June 1970. The event, documented by the movie Stamping Ground, is often remembered as the European Woodstock, because of the presence of many artists that had already played on that historical three-days concert, like Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Country Joe. But the Kralingen festival also showed how vital was the British scene on that period, offering great perfomances by bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, East Of Eden, Caravan, Fairport Convention, Family, T. Rex…