Dick Mine

condition (records/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve with glued-in insert. Obi included.

Before there was J-pop there was Dick Mine, born Tokuichi Mine in Kobe, the crooner who took Dinah into the Japanese charts in 1934 and spent the next half century as the country's resident Bing Crosby. He sang jazz standards in Japanese, translated Hollywood hits, played in films, survived the wartime ban on American music and came out the other side as a national institution. This Teichiku double set collects the hits across four decades of re-recordings, from the Kobe port-town swing of the thirties to the mood-orchestra treatments of the sixties.

What is startling is how good the early material is: a Japanese big band playing Fletcher Henderson charts in 1935 with real drive, and a singer who understood that swing is about diction. For anyone who thinks Japanese jazz begins with Sadao Watanabe, here is the prehistory. Gatefold with booklet.