Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalo Latin Beats - Dynamic Latin Exotic Sound (2016)

As with African Rock (アフリカン・ロック), the other Ishikawa album I'd been trying to track down for ages, there *is* some neat stuff going on here but it's a much friendlier, safer album than I'd hoped for. The theme here is on Brazilian and Cuban/Afro-Cuban musics with a couple of diversions into Puerto Rican and Mexican musics, and the covers (they're all covers) range from better known crossover Latin hits like Guantanamera, Babalu, Frenesi, and Sway (given its original title Quien sera? on this album) to the classier picks of Bahia, O Barquinho, and Nightingale. There's also a cover of Watermelon Man, for some reason. The brunt of these compositions date back to the fifties or older, and several of them would be picked up by folks like Les Baxter and Esquivel.

The good news is that, yes, this does have the tasty rhythm section grooves that most early to mid 70s Japanese jazz-rock albums with a gimmick tend to have, whether it's an Ishikawa project like The Mannheim Rock Ensemble or something by Takeshi Inomata or Jiro Inagaki. And there are definitely some groves here. Tons of bongos. And A1 and A5 go for the Santana sound and get fairly close.

The bad news is that the featured instrument on most of these tracks is piano. Just regular ol' piano. There *are* more than a few saxophone solos as well, but waaaaaaay too many of them are soprano sax solos that only make the whole thing that much friendlier and "smooth." Their version of Watermelon Man would actually be pretty damn good if the lead line wasn't being taken by a goddamned Kenny G soundalike. There's some nice background guitar with occasional distortion and wah on a few of these, including Watermelon Man, but there are twelve tracks here and Babalu is the only one with a guitar solo. And it's a brief, not-great solo at that. None of the free jazz tinges on other, earlier Ishikawa albums are here. Take away the groovy rhythm section and it's... Latin jazz. Plain, average-to-decent Latin jazz.

But that rhythm section IS groovy. Might not be any out and out great tracks, but it's a fun listen. And unlike African Rock, this album's extremely difficult to track down. Both of them were reissued as Japan-only CDs during the 2010s, but those are now long out of print and getting rarer. But African Rock is floating around if you know where to look. This isn't. Luckily, I found a lossless copy, which you can download here. As ever, write me when the link goes down and I'll reupload it. Given that it's lossless and sounds crystal clear, I'd guess it's a rip of the 2016 CD reissue.