Diggin In The Crates "Dedicated To Morning Musume" Edition

Thanks to a few things that prevented me from getting there (being engaged and having to save up for the wedding; having a thieving Republican bastard of a boss, etc.), I was not able to witness my favorite band make their American debut (and thus hang out with my YODC brothers Langdon, Eriku and SoG, and my partner at MegumiOhori.com, CK). Thus, the opening weekend of my July hiatus from my shitty jewelry store job was (in-between near-marathon work on my manuscript for Here Is The Wonderland) spent exchanging texts, Twitter SMS relays, and BlackBerry IM's with fellow Cancerian and all around good woman VeePinku as we mourned the fact that we would not be in the same room with The World's Greatest Girl Group. So, this selection from my Blue Note vinyl library is dedicated to Reina, Takitty, Risa, Koharu, Eri, Sayumi, Aika, JunJun and LinLin:

Artist: The Horace Silver Quintet

Title: The Tokyo Blues

Label: Blue Note

First released: 1962

Vinyl: Standard black vinyl; repress from Liberty/UA

Horace Silver, original pianist with the Jazz Messengers (yep, the same one Art Blakey took over, turned into a breeding ground for jazz greats, and led into jazz history), already with a nice nine-album back catalog on Blue Note (his most enduring classic, Song For My Father, wouldn't occur for three years yet), came back from a Japanese tour (where he was already godhead compared to his pre-Song For My Father status in America) at the start of 1962 so completely touched by his experience there that... well, we'll let the man's own opening sleeve note tell it:

This album is dedicated to all of our many fans in Japan and to all of the Japanese people who were so very kind to us while we were making our concert tour there. It is our wish to return again some day soon. While in Japan, I noticed that the Japanese people were very fond of Latin music, which I am also very fond of. In writing some of these compositions I have attempted to combine the Japanese feeling in the melodies with the Latin feeling in the rhythms. I hope you enjoy them.

The album is in print on both vinyl and CD as well as the ever handy iTunes and AmazonMP3, so I won't post a vinyl rip of such classics as "Sayanora Blues", "Too Much Sake", and "Ah! So" even though I did one of my own copy. I will say, that since my copy is a repress from when United Artists bought the Liberty label in1968 (Liberty had bought Blue Note from founder Albert Lion three years earlier), United Artists' label design for Blue Note has to be one of the fugliest I have ever seen... and unfortunately for me, a few of my Blue Notes (including a "fake stereo" copy of Miles Davis' Vol. 2) have this ugly-ass label, which was apparently patterened off of United Artists' own label:

The true Blue Note label design, for the record, is the one that existed since the label's beginning and was wisely revived when Capitol relaunched the label in 1985: