Yasunobu Matsuura & Mood Kings, Hidehiko Matsumoto And His Quintet, Kaoru Akimoto Quintet Plus All Stars, Akira Miyazawa Quintet

condition (records/cover): NM / EX-

Gatefold sleeve. No obi.

The tenor saxophone had a second life in Japan that the West mostly missed. Through the 1960s and 1970s, players like Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto, a bebop veteran who could have held down a chair in any New York band, and Yasunobu Matsuura with his Mood Kings recorded hundreds of mood kayō sides: enka and kayōkyoku hits reset as slow, vibrato-heavy tenor ballads over strings, vibraphone and brushed drums. The genre's name here, "ecstatic tenor," is not marketing exaggeration so much as a technical description of the phrasing, which sits somewhere between Ben Webster after midnight and a pachinko parlour at closing time.

This Victor double set is one of the definitive anthologies, four sides of it, in a heavy gatefold with an obi. Listen for the way the reverb is mixed almost as a second instrument. Nobody in Europe was making records this luxurious about being sad.