Road To Louisiana (remastered) (Record Store Day RSD 2021) vinyl

It's 1999 and Haruomi Hosono and pal Makoto Kubota - the latter arguably best known for their part in Les Rallies Denudes - decide to take on a daring project for the era. The Japanese artists opt to put out an album inspired by one of the world's foremost musical cities, New Orleans, which on paper couldn't be much further removed from the soundtrack of their homeland at that time.

Dig deeper, though, and while the Mississippi blues feels resolutely Deep South, an experience at odds with the Far East, Japan's incredibly fertile music scene back then actually shared more in common with Louisiana's aural calling cards than you might think. A hotbed of ideas, an understanding of what funk and soul mean, mastery of jazz's loose structures. Exceptional stuff, finally on re-issue