Tee & Company

"Tee" in Tee and Company is the nickname of Three Blind Mice's founder and producer Takeshi Fujii, who formed the all-star group of eight top Japanese jazz musicians in 1977 for a series of concerts and seven days of studio recording that produced three separate albums. This supergroup included who's who of the Japanese jazz scene: Kenji Mori and Takao Uematsu on saxophones, Masaru Imada on piano, Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, Hideto Kanai on bass, Nobuyoshi Ino on electric bass, Hiroshi Murakami on drums and Yuji Imamura on percussion. Fujii and the musicians at the time were pursuing jazz as a new art form and not just as commercial entertainment. The vitality of the two performances -- each lasting over 14 minutes and covering the entire side of the original LP -- backed by very high levels of musicianship is quite exciting and impressive. This is an important historic document of the energy that jazz had in Japan in the late 1970s!