Artist: Takehiro Honda
Album: What's Going On
Genre: Soul-Jazz
Label: Solid Records/Ultra-Vybe, Inc.
Released: 1973/2012
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Ain't Tell You a Good Way But (Honda) - 3:32
- Check-Out Your Mind (Mayfield) - 5:15
- Ain't Funky Now (Honda) - 4:34
- What's Going On (Cleveland-Gaye-Benson) - 4:42
- Sham Time (Harris) - 5:13
- Greasy Spoon (Hooper) - 5:42
- Dock of the Bay (Cropper-Redding) - 5:54
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- Personnel:
- Takehiro Honda - piano, electric piano, Hammond
- Tetsuo Fushimi, Shuzo Morikawa - trumpet
- Teddy Adams - trombone
- Kosuke Mine - alto saxophone
- Kazunori Takeda - tenor saxophone
- James Cheek, Takuji Kusumoto - drums
- Tamio Kawabata - bass
- Ken Lawson - guitar
- Yuji Imamura - congas
Recorded in the U.S. with arranger Teddy Adams, What's Going On embraces in full the American influences that shape it -- the polemical R&B of James Brown and Marvin Gaye looms heavy via covers of "Ain't It Funky Now" and the title cut, while the sound and sensibility clearly draw from West coast soul-jazz innovators like Les McCann and Gerald Wilson. But the curiosity and estrangement inherent in the album's stranger-in-a-strange-land origins are in fact its dominant element: Takehiro Honda doesn't simply channel his myriad influences, he also dissects them, taking them apart and putting them back together to understand how they work. The result is a wonderfully eccentric and heartfelt interpretation of American funk rendered in distinctly Japanese terms -- studious but a bit goofy, formal yet passionately groovy.
Review by Jason Ankeny