Kazuo Imai

Deluxe edition featuring heavy tip-on jackets

Black Editions present a reissue of Kazuo Imai's Far and Wee, originally released in 2004. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements.

Though he began performing in the 1970s, his 2004 P.S.F. album Far and Wee was only the second under his name. In a series of thrilling acoustic guitar improvisations -- Imai's playing crackles with dynamic tension and physicality as well as a subtlety and nuance that reveals him as one of the instrument's true masters and innovators.

In 2004, Kazuo Imai  recorded a series of nylon-string classical guitar improvisations at the request of P.S.F. founder Hideo Ikeezumi. far and wee, the resulting album, vibrates with the inherent duality of nylon: the strings stretch and snap back like rubber tautened and released, and paint the softest of caresses in silky washes.

PERSONNEL:

• Kazuo Imai - (guitar, chair)

Live recording on April 24, 2004

TRACKS:

• SIDE A
• A1. 2-B ...... 09:01
• A2. 3 ...... 07:54
• A3. 4 ...... 06:58

• SIDE B
• B1. 5 ...... 05:39
• B2. 6 ...... 06:25
• B3. 9-AB ...... 05:25