Masabumi Kikuchi Sextet With Sadao Watanabe Quartet - 1970 - Collaboration

Masabumi Kikuchi Sextet With Sadao Watanabe Quartet

1970

Collaboration

A1. Illusion 14:55

A2. Thanatos (Take 2) 7:03

B1. Up Tight 14:10

B2. So Por Voci 1:18

B3. Lunar Eclipse 9:48

C1. Hiro 10:34

C2. Drizzing Rain 11:25

D1. Microcosm I 6:23

D2. Without Lullaby 6:35

D3. Thanatos (Take 1) 10:52

Bass – Yoshio Ikeda

Drums – Hiro Tsunoda, Hiroshi Murakami, Keiji Kishida

Electric Bass, Cello, Bass – Yoshio Suzuki

Electric Piano, Organ – Masahiro Kikuchi

Electric Piano, Piano – Masabumi Kikuchi

Guitar – Yoshiaki Masuo

Sopranino Saxophone, Alto Saxophone – Sadao Watanabe

Soprano Saxophone – Kohsuke Mine

Recording date: October 8th (D3), October 13th (B1), November 14th (all others), 1970.

Original 2LP release in gatefold sleeve. Includes circle-shaped 4-panel insert.

We’re back from the holidays, slightly sunburned, moderately overfed, and entirely unrepentant. As promised, we are diving straight into the deep end of rare Japanese albums, and there is scarcely a deeper or rarer plunge than the 1970 double LP Collaboration by Masabumi Kikuchi Sextet with Sadao Watanabe Quartet. This is not merely a record; it is a two-disc summit meeting that feels like two parallel universes decided to share a studio and see what happened when the walls came down. (Big shout out to Ken Golden who osted a photo of the album the other day, and gave the idea to post the vinyl rip)

Masabumi Kikuchi, born in Tokyo in 1939 and later nicknamed “Poo” or “Poo-Sun,” was already a restless explorer by the time this session took place. He had absorbed the American masters—Duke Ellington’s aristocratic swing, Thelonious Monk’s angular poetry, Miles Davis’s restless reinvention—through the second-hand records left behind by occupying soldiers and through the living presence of visiting giants. After a stint with Lionel Hampton’s touring band, a formative period at Berklee, and early collaborations with Terumasa Hino, Kikuchi returned to Japan determined to forge something that was neither pure imitation nor polite export. His music of 1970 crackles with the voltage of Miles’s electric period while retaining a distinctly Japanese sense of space and sudden intensity. Sadao Watanabe, six years older and already a national institution, brought a different kind of gravity. Self-taught after the war, steeped in Charlie Parker, then transformed by Brazilian rhythms and later by African textures, Watanabe had by 1970 become Japan’s most internationally visible jazz ambassador. He had studied at Berklee, performed at Newport and Montreux, and was in the process of expanding the vocabulary of Japanese jazz far beyond the bebop that had first captivated him. Their collaboration feels less like a polite handshake and more like two strong currents meeting in the same river.

The musicians involved form a small army of Japan’s finest. On Kikuchi’s side sit the pianist himself (acoustic and electric), his younger brother Masahiro Kikuchi on organ and electric piano, Kohsuke Mine on soprano saxophone, Yoshio Ikeda on bass, and the dual-drum tandem of Hiroshi Murakami and Keiji Kishida. Watanabe’s quartet answers with the leader on alto and sopranino saxophones, Yoshiaki Masuo on guitar, Yoshio Suzuki on bass and electric bass, and Hiro Tsunoda on drums. The resulting ensemble is not a polite merging of two groups but a deliberate collision. Two rhythm sections, two keyboardists, two saxophones of different temperaments—everything is doubled, and the music thrives on that excess.

Philips, through its Japanese arm Nippon Phonogram, was the perfect vehicle for such an ambitious project. The label had become a crucial outlet for the new wave of Japanese jazz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, giving Kikuchi a home for a remarkable run of records that same year. Collaboration was recorded at Victor Studio in Tokyo across three dates in October and November 1970 and issued as a handsome gatefold double LP (FS-5052~3) that same year or early the next. The production, engineered and mixed by Yoshihisa Tomabechi and produced by Masaharu Honjo, captures the chaos with remarkable clarity: instruments are often panned hard left and right so that the two bands seem to face each other across the stereo spectrum, dueling in real time.

The music itself is a masterclass in controlled mayhem. Side A opens with the fourteen-and-a-half-minute “Illusion,” a slow-burn epic that builds from modal haze into electric turbulence. Kikuchi’s Rhodes and acoustic piano trade shadowy statements while Watanabe’s sopranino cuts through like a thin blade of light. “Thanatos” (the second take) is darker still, its title nodding toward the death drive even as the music pulses with stubborn life. “Up Tight,” co-credited to Kikuchi and Masuo, lives up to its name: guitar and electric piano lock into a tense groove while the dual drums push and pull like rival tides. Watanabe’s brief “So Por Voci” offers a moment of almost vocal lyricism before “Lunar Eclipse” closes the first disc in a wash of cosmic dissonance. The second disc begins with Watanabe’s “Hiro,” a more open, almost pastoral statement that still carries an undercurrent of restlessness. Kikuchi’s “Drizzring Rain” (yes, the spelling is endearingly imperfect) stretches out into eleven minutes of atmospheric dialogue, while “Microcosm I” and “Without Lullaby” explore smaller, more intimate cells of sound. The alternate take of “Thanatos” that ends the set feels like a ghost revisiting the earlier version, darker and more unresolved. Throughout, the technical achievement is the way the ensemble never collapses under its own weight. The multi-drummer setup creates a polyrhythmic density that recalls early Weather Report or Miles’s Bitches Brew sessions, yet the Japanese musicians bring a different sense of restraint and sudden release—moments of near-silence that make the subsequent eruptions all the more startling.

The artwork matches the music’s intensity. Shigo Yamaguchi’s cover design, with photography by Yuzo Sato, presents a stark, almost abstract visual language typical of Japanese jazz packaging of the era: bold typography, carefully balanced negative space, and a gatefold that opens like a secret door. Inside, a circular four-panel insert adds further visual intrigue. There is nothing decorative or tourist-friendly here; the sleeve feels as serious and slightly mysterious as the music it contains.

Reception at the time was necessarily limited by geography and the specialized nature of the Japanese jazz market, but among those who heard it, Collaboration quickly acquired the status of a private masterpiece. Decades later it has become something rarer still: a genuine grail. Collectors speak of it in hushed tones; Discogs ratings hover near perfection; YouTube comments under full-album uploads treat the record like a holy text that somehow escaped the usual reissue machinery. Critics who have encountered it praise its fearless synthesis of post-bop, fusion, and avant-garde impulses, noting that it captures a precise moment when Japanese jazz was no longer content to follow American models but was actively rewriting the rules. Its legacy is paradoxical. Because it has never received a proper CD or complete vinyl reissue as a double album—only the 1977 single-LP Part 1 and Part 2 splits—it remains largely the province of dedicated hunters. Yet that scarcity has only sharpened its reputation. In the ongoing rediscovery of Japanese jazz, Collaboration stands as one of the purest expressions of the early-1970s experimental spirit: ambitious, slightly unhinged, deeply musical, and still capable of surprising anyone willing to track down an original copy. It is the sound of two major artists refusing to play it safe, and the result continues to reward every new listener who finds their way to it.