Jiro Inagaki

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Obi included.

Collectors know Jiro Inagaki for Head Rock and the Soul Media records, the hard Japanese jazz-rock that Universounds and others have spent twenty years reissuing. This is his other career: the mood tenor, the ballad player for hire, cutting a Columbia album of hits with a big vibrato and a sympathetic string section. It is the same player, the same weight of tone, just pointed at a different audience.

Listen with the jazz-rock records in mind and the connection is obvious; Inagaki's sense of where to land a note in a ballad is what made his funk phrasing so certain. Japanese Columbia pressing, ALS series.