Nobuo Hara and His Sharps & Flats

*2026 stock* Nobuo Hara led Sharps & Flats for an astonishing run, well over half a century, and the band became one of the institutions of Japanese jazz, in roughly the same way the Clarke-Boland Big Band held its place in Europe. Active Volcano catches the ensemble in particularly muscular form: arrangements that draw on the funkier, groove-conscious end of seventies big-band writing, brass passages that hit hard without losing definition, and a sense of swing that belongs less to the swing era than to the soul-jazz and post-Maynard-Ferguson tradition that was current at the time.

Hara was the kind of bandleader who kept his ensemble honest: these are working-band arrangements, played by working-band musicians, with the unforced authority that implies. A record for listeners interested in how the big-band format kept itself alive through the seventies, and in how a Japanese ensemble could absorb the international vocabulary while keeping its own particular precision. Reissued in the Three Blind Mice Supreme Collection 1500.