WE CURRENTLY HAVE  NEARLY 200  LISTED ITEMS

 

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·      SEIKATSU KŌJYŌ LINKAI - SELF-TITLED FIRST ALBUM ("SEIKATSU KOJYO LINKAI") ORIGINAL JAPANESE PRESSING - INSANELY RARE ORIGINAL 1975 JAPANESE-ONLY ALM RECORDS PRIVATE PRESSING STEREO LP SKI NO. 1 WITH OBI..

 

·      ORIGINAL JAPANESE PRESSING

 

·      JAPANESE AUDIOPHILE HIGH QUALITY PRESSING ON A VIRGIN VINYL

 

·      ORIGINAL  YELLOW ALM LABEL WITH SIMPLE BLACK PRINT AND NO GRAPHICS

 

·      THIS IS THE ORIGINAL, AUTHENTIC, FIRST JAPANESE PRESSING; THIS IS NOT A REISSUE, AN IMPORT, OR A COUNTERFEIT PRESSING.

 

·      INCLUDES ORIGINAL JAPANESE "OBI" COVER SASH/RIBBON

 

·      ORIGINAL, THICK CARDBOARD COVER (AMERICAN STYLE)

 

·      CLEAN, WEAR-FREE LABELS

 

·      THICK, HEAVY VINYL PRESSING

 

(►PLEASE SEE THE IMAGE OF THE COVER, LABEL OR BOTH, SHOWN BELOW)

(Note: this is a REAL image of the ACTUAL item you are bidding on. This is NOT a "recycled" image from our previous auction. What you see is what you’ll get.  GUARANTEED!)

 

 

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Ferocious JP / US free jazz bomb. A rare meeting between the NYC free jazz scene and the Japanese free music scene. 

 

Following hot on the heels of the first, mid-sixties generation of Japanese free jazz players like Kaoru Abe, Masayuki Takayanagi, Yōsuke Yamashita, Motoharu Yoshizawa, etc., an exciting second wave of younger players began to emerge in the seventies. Two of its leading members were the saxophonist Kazutoki Umezu and multi-instrumentalist Yoriyuki Harada. Both were post-war babies and immigrants to the city, Umezu from Sendai in the north and Harada from Shimane in the west. They first met as students in the clarinet department at the Kunitachi College of Music, a well-known conservatory in western Tokyo. Harada was already securing sideman gigs on bass with professional jazz groups and was active in student politics, making good use of his connections to set up jazz concerts on campus. It was around this time that the two began to play together in an improvised duo, with Umezu on clarinet and bass clarinet and Harada on piano. They also experimented with graphic scores and prepared piano.

 

These experiments eventually led to the creation of a trio, with a high-school student called Tetsuya Morimura on drums, that they decided to name Seikatsu Kōjyō Iinkai (Lifestyle Improvement Committee) in joking reference to the Marxist discourse of the student radicals of the time. Around 1973, Umezu and Harada decided to call it a day and go their separate ways. Umezu began playing with the Toshinori Kondo Unit and Harada with the Tadashi Yoshida Quintet. In 1974 Harada formed his own trio and began to play at jazz coffeehouses across Japan.

 

Then, in September 1974 Umezu travelled alone to New York, where he set about building connections with the loft jazz scene in the city. It was a fortuitous moment to arrive in New York. Rents were cheap in the Lower East Side, possibilities for squatting existed, so many musicians and artists had moved to the area. Umezu soon became known on the scene as Kappo and he started to make connections with some of the young musicians like David Murray, Arthur Blythe, and Oliver Lake. He recalls making the rounds of the lofts every evening, checking out the performances, and getting the chance to sit in with many groups including Juma Sultan’s Aboriginal Music Society and trumpeter Ted Daniel’s orchestra.

 

Things were going so well that Umezu wrote to Harada and invited him to come to New York. He accepted and arrived in the city in July 1975. Harada and Umezu took the opportunity to resume their artistic collaboration. Their first concert together in over two years took place on July 20th at another loft, Sunrise Studios at 122 2nd Avenue. Umezu remembers Sunrise as an unusually sunny loft with the rarest of things, a grand piano. He invited along Ahmed Abdullah, a trumpeter he had got to know while playing with Ted Daniel. Abdullah led his own group and was a long-term Sun Ra sideman. William Parker, one of the key figures in the loft jazz scene of the period, was on bass. Abdullah also brought along Rashid Sinan on drums. Sinan drummed in Abdullah’s units throughout the seventies, but he had also played on Frank Lowe’s immortal Black Beings album and collaborated with Arthur Doyle, playing on Doyle’s Alabama Feeling album. By all accounts the evening was a huge success, with speed and dynamism of Harada’s piano playing gaining him lots of support.

 

Since they had managed to save some money from their day jobs, Umezu and Harada decided to set up a recording session with the same line-up on August 11 at Studio We, where there was a well-equipped studio on the third floor.

 

Umezu recalls the session as follows,

 

"Of course, we recorded our performances in one take, with zero retakes as far as I remember. On all the tracks we recorded, we moved as one unit, sharp and fast. That was the nature of Lifestyle Improvement Committee, New York Branch".

 

Umezu and Harada would later become known for the elements of parody and entertainment that they brought to their music, a freewheeling blend of pastiche, humour and on-stage performativity that paralleled the approaches of the Art Ensemble, Sun Ra, and Holland’s ICP. But here, on their first recordings, the humour element is not yet present. Instead, there is a febrile sense of joy in creation and connection. On the Umezu-penned “Kim”, for example, Harada opens the piece with a speedy exploration of the full-range of the keyboard, hitting hard on the bass keys to create a rhythmic bed out of which patterns begin to emerge. Umezu enters at a much slower pace, longer held notes that at first float weightlessly over the urgency of the piano before they begin in splinter and accelerate. When Parker and Sinan kick in, it’s a rollicking tempo with Parker plucking deep and hard and the left-handed Sinan skittering hard across the topside of his kit. Abdullah kicks in a glorious solo twelve minutes in, bright and breathy at once. The piece slows and grows more spacious towards the end, giving Parker a chance to showcase some arco work that shades beautifully into the air against Abdullah’s trumpet

 

 (EXCERPT FROM AN ANONYMOUS ONLINE REVIEW)

 

AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

 

WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT WE HAVE PARTNERED WITH THE OWNER OF ONE OF THE MOST MAJESTIC, MINDBLOWING RECORD COLLECTIONS ON THE PLANET EARTH (16,000 LP ALBUMS ALTOGETHER, OF WHICH ROUGHLY 10,000 TO BE OFFERED TO THE PUBLIC), TO OFFER ONLINE HIS COLLECTION TO THE MUSIC PROFESSIONALS, SERIOUS JAZZ COLLECTORS AND GENERAL PUBLIC WORLDWIDE. BARRING ANY LAST-MINUTE IMPEDIMENTS (SUCH AS HEALTH ISSUES, WARS, ECONOMIC UPHEAVALS, CLIMATE CATASTROPHES, PANDEMICS, ETC.) THIS WILL BE THE SINGLE BIGGEST PROJECT THIS SELLER HAS EVER BEEN INVOLVED IN AND IS EXPECTED TO LAST ANYWHERE BETWEEN THREE AND FIVE YEARS. WE ANTICIPATE THAT WE WILL BE OFFERING INDIVIDUAL ITEMS IN GROUPS OF 150-300 IN SIZE, LISTED APPROXIMATELY ONE MONTH APART. THIS IS THE FIRST OF WHAT WILL PROBABLY BE ABOUT 50 SIMILAR INSTALLMENTS AND SHOULD GIVE YOU A GOOD IDEA OF WHAT IS TO COME. ON SEEING THIS AMAZING COLLECTION FOR THE FIRST TIME, THIS SELLER'S FIRST REACTION WAS INTENSE, ALMOST VISCERAL, DISBELIEF. IT TOOK YOURS TRULY ABOUT 10 MINUTES OF PINCHING, HEAD-SCRATCHING AND CONTINUOUS GASPING TO REGAIN HIS BREATH AND GRASP THE SHEER MAGNITUDE AND HISTORICAL DEPTH AND BREADTH OF THIS COLLECTION. ALMOST 70% OF THESE ITEMS THIS SELLER SEES FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, DESPITE THE FACT THAT HE HAD SPENT MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY COLLECTING RECORDS.

 

THE BULK OF THE COLLECTION (ABOUT 90%) CONSISTS OF SOME OF THE RAREST AND MOST COVETED FREE- AND AVANT-GARDE JAZZ, SPIRITUAL JAZZ, RADICAL FREE-BLOWING JAZZ, FAR-OUT FUSION, ELECTRONIC JAZZ, SOUL-JAZZ,  BEAT POETRY, EXPERIMENTAL AND IMPROVISATORY JAZZ AND MILITANT AND TRIBAL JAZZ OF EVERY SHAPE, SHADE AND FORM KNOWN TO MAN. NOTHING OF THIS NATURE HAS EVER BEEN SO SYSTEMATICALLY ASSEMBLED AND OBSESSIVELY PRESERVED IN ONE PLACE IN THE AVANT-GARDE JAZZ DOMAIN EVER, ANYWHERE, BY ANYONE. ALL MAJOR ARTISTS WHO EVER CREATED MUSIC IN THE FREE- AND SPIRITUAL JAZZ REALM WILL BE REPRESENTED, AS WILL BE HUNDREDS OF LESSER KNOWN, BUT EQUALLY INFLUENTIAL CULT ARTISTS WHO LEFT INDELIBLE STAMP ON THE WORLD OF THE MODERN JAZZ. LIKEWISE, ALL MAJOR STREAMS AND RECORDING LABELS OF FREE JAZZ WILL BE REPRESENTED, IMPRINTS SUCH AS ESP, INDIA NAVIGATION, EL SATURN, FMP, HAT HUT, BLACK SAINT, SOUL NOTE, RED RECORDS, 1HORO,  LEO (UK). TRIBE, ISPLASCH, QBICO, STRATA-EAST, BLACK JAZZ, BLACK LION, MOSAIC  AND DOZENS OF OTHER HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY LABELS. WHILE CLASSIC HARD BOP AND ITS BANNER LABELS (BLUE NOTE, PRESTIGE, RIVERSIDE, FANTASY, ETC) WILL BE INCLUDED, THEY WILL COMPRISE A DISTINCT MINORITY OF OUR JOINT OFFERINGS. APROXIMATELY 20-30% OF ALL ITEMS WILL BE FOREIGN PRESSINGS, MOSTLY THOSE UNIQUE TO THEIR MARKETS AND NEVER AVAILABLE IN THE UNITED STATES. YOU CAN ALSO EXPECT TO SEE HUNDREDS OF PRIVATE PRESSINGS, TEST PRESSINGS , ACETATES, AUDIOPHILE AND LIMITED/NUMBERED RELEASES AND ALIKE. THE COLLECTION ALSO FEATURES A SMALL NUMBER OF OTHER GENRES, SUCH AS BLUES, R&B, FUNK AND LATIN AND A NEGLIGIBLE NUMBER OF ROCK TITLES..

 

THIS IS A PRIMEVAL, FIERY, VIOLENTLY PASSIONATE MUSIC, PERPETUALY MODERN AND EVERY BIT AS TIMELESS AS THE DAY IT WAS BORN; A PERPETUAL QUEST FOR FREEDOM AND SPIRITUALITY; AN ERUPTIVE, VOLCANIC STATEMENT - A SCREAM, REALLY - OF LIBERATION FROM ALL SOCIAL NORMS AND FORMS; IT IS A QUINTESSENTIAL LATE-20th CENTURY ART, EVERY BIT AS RELEVANT TO THE ARTISTIC AND SPIRITUAL QUEST OF THE CONTEMPORARY HUMANITY AS THE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF BRANCUSI, COCTEAU, POLLOCK, MOORE, JASPER JOHNS, BASQUIAT, BUNUEL, BERGMAN, MAKAVEJEV; TARKOVSKY, JOHN CAGE, PHILIP GLASS, TERRY RILEY, FRANK ZAPPA, JACK KEROUAC, ALLEN GINSBERG OR LE MONTE YOUNG

 

THIS COLLECTION HAS BEEN OBSESSIVELY BUILT UP AND ORGANISED AND COMPULSIVELY PRESERVED FOR DECADES (SINCE THE MID-60s: THE OWNER BORE WITNESS TO THE MOST OF THE AMERICAN JAZZ PIONEERS AND HAS STORIES AND STORIES TO TELL). ASIDE FROM THE STILL SEALED ITEMS (YES, THERE WILL BE SOME), ALMOST 95% OF ALL ITEMS FALL INTO THE STRONG NEAR MINT TO UNPLAYED RANGE. A NEGLIGIBLE PERCENTAGE OF ALL ITEMS FALL INTO THE VERY GOOD++ RANGE (AND VIRTUALLY NONE BELOW VG++). SOME OF THESE BEAUTIFUL MUSEUM PIECES LOOKED SO PERFECT THAT WE HAD TO REINSPECT AND RE-EXAMINE THEM A FEW TIMES TO MAKE SURE THEY OUR EYES ARE NOT DECEIVING US. MOST OF THE ITEMS FROM THIS COLLECTION WILL BE OF ARCHIVAL GRADE AND TRULY YOUR FINAL UPGRADES

 

THE ITEM YOU ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING AT COMES FROM THIS COLLECTION, AS WILL EVERY OTHER ITEM WHICH CONTAINS THIS TEXT.

 

THANK YOU FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF VISITING OUR EBAY LISTINGS.

 

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·      CONDITION:

 

·      THE RECORD

 

(IMPORTANT NOTE: unless otherwise noted, ALL records are graded visually, and NOT play-graded!; we  grade records under the strong, diffuse room light or discrete sunlight)

 

(a)         WE GRADE THE VINYL  AS  NEAR MINT. Some VERY LIGHT AND SUPERFICIAL abrasions – mostly sleeve scuffs -  are (barely) visible, but are probably inaudible,  and do not affect visual integrity or beauty of the vinyl. The original luster is very much intact, and the vinyl shines and sparkles almost like new.

 

(b)         The record comes in a hi-grade PVC inner sleeve, which has - apparently with success - shielded the record from the harmful impact of elements over many years!

 

(c)         The record is pressed on a beautiful, thick, inflexible vinyl, which was usually used for the first or very early pressings. Usually, the sound on such thick vinyl pressings is full-bodied, vivid, and even dramatic. Do not expect to obtain such a majestic analog sound from a digital recording!

 

(d)         The album comes with its original OBI sash/belt wrapped around the cover

 

(e)         Of course, this is a full-bodied ANALOG recording, and not an inferior, digital recording!!!

 

 

·                          THE COVER

 

THE COVER IS (WEAK) NEAR MINT !

 

The following flaws or imperfections are noted on the cover:

 

-       Cover shows some light yellowing on both sides, apparently from aging.  (nothing significant)

-       Cover has a visible "wrinkle"(crease)  in one of the corners.

-       Cover has one corner slightly dinged (nothing significant)

-       Cover has a few tiny wrinkles along the top seam   (BARELY VISIBLE)

 

 

NO OTHER VISIBLE FLAWS OR IMPERFECTIONS ON THE  COVER

 

 

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POSTAGE & SHIPPING:

 

We offer THREE postage rates for both Domestic and International Mail: Media Mail, Priority Mail and Express Mail for domestic, and First Class, Priority International Mail, and Express International Mail for international orders. INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS PLEASE NOTE: WE RECOMMEND (BUT DO NOT INSIST) that you select USPS International Priority Mail OR International Express mail when making a payment.

 

INTERNATIONAL POSTAGE rates vary from one region of  the world to another. For SPECIFIC international and domestic postage rates ►. While you can be rest assured that our packaging is careful, sturdy and impact-proof, please note that damage, loss or theft in transit is always possible, and in the case of some countries even PROBABLE. To discuss this potential problem and ensure flawless delivery, please contact us thru eBay BEFORE placing a bid.

 

 

WANT A DISCOUNT ?!? 

IT’S EASY: CLICK ► TO see HOW!

(please note recent changes in our policy)

 

 

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FOR OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION, CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW:

 

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OUR REFUND POLICY :

 

WE OFFER UNCONDITIONAL MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM THE RECEIPT OF THE MERCHANDISE, NO QUESTIONS ASKED; Still sealed items MUST be returned sealed in order to be eligible for a refund Some restrictions apply. Please read our complete refund policy before placing a bid. ►  for the full text of our policy

 

 

FINE (BUT IMPORTANT!) PRINT

 

 (1) The year indicated in the title bar is the year of the original release,  NOT necessarily the year of the actual pressing; for the actual generation of the pressing, please see our item description (top section, text in red letters). (2) Please do NOT bid based on the title bar, subtitle bar or item specifics box alone; instead, please read the entire description and grading before bidding; (3) Absolutely NO order cancellations after the auction closes. ever, under any circumstances. We can ONLY cancel bids before the item closes. (4) We are unable to cancel bids in the final 12 hours of the auction; if you need to do so, please contact eBay for help (5) We are unable to provide matrix-, stamper- or other pressing  information in the final 24 hours of the auction. If you require this information, please contact us well before the final day of the auction. (6) Yes, we DO combine shipments. Please click on "Shipping and Payment" tab on top of the auction page for additional details. (7)  All Paypal payments must be made from confirmed Paypal shipping addresses. NO third party shipping addresses will be honored  (8) Absolutely NO partial refunds: if you are unhappy with the merchandise you received, please return it for a full refund, postage included (9). Civilized people can disagree without accusing each other of being indecent or dishonest; if you need proof of this seller's personal integrity, please check our eBay feedback, which speaks for itself  (10) All disagreements and miscommunications can be - and will only be - solved in a civil and mutually respectful manner;  please avoid puerile, offensive, abrasive or menacing language (attempted humor is fine and usually appreciated, although overused-to-death sarcasms can be really, really tedious. (11) This seller will accommodate all reasonable requests and is generally a flexible and agreeable person (12) Our love & appreciation for your trust, loyalty and business, always and forever;  Thank You & Good Night!

 

 

© 2001,2007 MDJ. All rights reserved.

 

On Aug 1, 2023 at 19:36:33 PDT, seller added the following information: