You would not believe the stuff people just dump at the thrift store. Japanese CDs are expensive in America, and although Goodwill's awful, seemingly crazy glued price stickers mean this one now has cover damage (the rip on the B in Bop was not there before they put that damn thing on), a buck's still a hell of a bargain. But a bargain for what?
It's got to be jazz--every indicator screams it, from the four day recording period to the instrument abbreviations to the band name to the guitar and bass that clearly cost more than my car--each--to the serious af look on Watanabe's face in the upper right pic of the left inside cover. The Carla Bley and Oliver Nelson songs in the tracklist are almost beside the point in comparison.
The only musician I'm familiar with is four track guest Cyro Baptista, a Brazilian percussionist who I first heard in the early '00s ten piece version of the Trey Anastasio Band, and who has also played with Medeski, Martin, & Wood, Santana, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, and a zillion other people in rock and jazz, most of them fabulously interesting musicians. Which is a good sign but not an indicative one, as the breadth of his collab list means this disc could sound like pretty much anything.
The acoustic guitar makes me doubt that it'll be one of those avant garde exercises where the only reason the musicians even use traditional instruments is to prove they can make completely amusical sounds on them. Acoustic drums and horns can pull that off no problem, but you really need to plug a guitar in to get that formless.
That still leaves a lot of latitude; electric guitar jazz can be loud as heavy metal, smooth as pureed peanut butter, or anywhere in between. Mo' Bop III could sound like a wordless rock power trio, trad jazz with a guitar instead of a horn, free jazz with a guitar instead of a horn, fusion--nothing I can see here makes any one of those more likely than any other. So I'm very curious to see what this sounds like. Also, gotta love language. Think of how weird it is that "see what this sounds like" is an intelligible sentence.
Here's the disc and what appears to be an info sheet explaining that this is a hybrid regular/SACD. For our younger readers and/or anyone who somehow doesn't remember twenty year old obscure audio formats, Super Audio CDs were briefly a thing in the early '00s (this album is from 2006); it was put up against High Def CDs, or maybe it was DVD audio, in a battle for recorded sound supremacy. The general public looked at both and chose mp3s, because people don't have ears.
This though, I have no idea what this is. Anyone read Japanese?
There's something vaguely ominous about that "thank you for your continued co-operation." Maybe it's the assumption that I'm already complying. Maybe it's the idea that a record company expects us to have a relationship where I do things for them that go beyond buying a product. Whatever the case, kinda freaked. If ewe record commandos don't seize me over the weekend for failure to cooperate, I'll tell you what this disc sounds like on Monday.
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