Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio: Girl Talk [96/24 Stereo LP Rip]

Year: 1975
Lable: Three Blind Mice (CISCO) TBM-2559-45, 2-LP Set
Style: Jazz
Country: Japan
Audio: 24bit-96kHz - Vinyl Rip, WAV
Size: 950 MB

About the Recording

Girl Talk has some of the most interesting, imaginative arrangements of standards I've come across. This is excellent, swinging jazz music. I play it on a regular basis just for enjoyment. It's an amazing sounding Three Blind Mice recording, one of their best. If you didn't know better you would swear it's a Direct Disc!

This is also one of my favorite Three Blind Mice records musically. It's real jazz, from the school where popular songs are turned into an opportunity to rework them in a jazzy style. The best examples of that are on side 1, where Yamamoto takes the song The Way We Were and slows it down to a crawl – somehow it works! Followed by Girl Talk by Neil Hefti, which has a Midnight Sugar groove going. Since that's one of the best TBM titles, you can consider it quite a compliment.

The other sides are almost as good, with a batch of well-chosen jazz standards and the lovely pop tune What Now My Love.

From the CiscoMusic.com website:

Completing a “trilogy” of great records that started with MIDNIGHT SUGAR and MISTY, GIRL TALK solidified Tsuyoshi Yamamoto’s reputation as Japan’s premier jazz pianist. Though he would continue to tour and record for Takeshi “Tee” Fujii more than a decade, GIRL TALK became the pinnacle of his career. This trio of classic LPs together are a benchmark in Japanese jazz records in particular and recording engineering in general.

As usual, master recordist Yoshihiko Kannari worked with Yamamoto, bassist Akira Daiyoshi and drummer Tetsujiro Onaba at AOI Studios, Tokyo, which featured a tight, nicely baffled room. Kannari’s recordings are prized for their immediacy and dynamic expressiveness, both traits exhibited on GIRL TALK to startling effect. Like MIDNIGHT SUGAR and MISTY before it, Kannari’s work on GIRL TALK won him the prestigious Swing Journal Critic Poll “Jazz Disc” Engineering award in 1976. It is only natural that Cisco Music include this historic title on its Limited Edition 45-rpm HQ-180 Vinyl.

The four sides were cut by Tohru Kotetsu and supervised by Tee Fujii at JVD Disc Mastering in Tokyo. Every pounding right hand stroke on the piano, every brush swish on the trap kit and every finger pluck on the bass are reproduced with You- Are-There accuracy. Crystaline highs and deep lows and uncompressed analog sonics will challenge analog playback systems and reward discerning listeners, but only for a limited time.


Musicians:

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, piano
Isoo Fukui, bass
Tetsujiro Obara, drums


Track Listing:

1. THE WAY WE WERE
2. GIRL TALK
3. GONE WITH THE WIND
4. TAKE THE ‘A’ TRAIN
5. I LOVE YOU PORGY
6. WHAT NOW MY LOVE
7. AUTUMN IN NEW YORK


Ripping Equipment:

Turntable: Nottingham Analogue Interspace;
Cartridge: Shelter 501 MKII Low Output MC;
Phono amp: Ray Samuels Audio Emmeline XR-2;
Power cables: Black Sand Cables Silver Reference MKV with Wattgate 330i-350i Ag;
Computer: MacBook Pro (FireWire out);
АDC: Edirol FA-66 FireWire
Software: Soundtrack Pro @ 96kHz/32-bit floating point/ClickRepair.