SADAO WATANABE — Good Time For Love (review)

SADAO WATANABE — Good Time For Love album cover Album · 1986 · Pop/Art Song/Folk Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
js
Sadao Watanabe is one of the top alto saxophonists in the jazz world for the last six decades. He, along with Phil Woods, Eric Dolphy and Cannonball Adderly, is one of the top successors to the legacy of Charlie Parker. Sadao has put out many great records over the years and has worked with some of the best musicians that the US and Japan have to offer, but he is also known for putting on some commercial fare, more than likely to help pay the bills, which leads us to 1986’s “Good Time for Love”. The mid-80s were not a great time for jazz, commercial interests had taken over and saccharine smooth jazz was dominating the jazz charts. There is a lengthy list of musicians involved on this album and you may recognize many names from the US, Japan and Jamaica. About half the album is okay smooth jazz, with the other half just being way too sweet and vacuous for consumption.

Lets look at some of the better tracks. The album opener shares the same title as the album and is a decent reggae groove. It helps that they have some top notch Jamaican musicians on board as few things sound worse than badly played reggae. “Loving You is Easy” is a good funky soul jazz number and may be the best cut on the album except for the Caribbean groove of “Pogo”. “Pogo” is the only track on the album that just seems to end too soon. “Step Out on the Street” is okay smooth jazz RnB, but the rest of the album is pretty sappy and hits a low with “When We Make a Home”. This one actually has cringe vocals and the sort of lyrics you could imagine that would go with a song title like that. Overall, this is an okay smooth jazz record if you like that sort of thing, but if you like the real jazz, Watanabe has some much better albums out there.
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