Pacific Trip - Seiji Hiraoka

Arranged and conducted by Seiji Hiraoka
Vibes with The Montage featuring Mauricio Smith Flute
Side A
Classical Gas
Hey Jude
Montage
A Fool on the Hill
Don't Forget Me
Gentile On My Mind
Side Bn
Turn Around & Look At Me
To Wait for Love
Pineapple Special
Harper Valley PTA
Revolution
Light My Fire
You chose these songs. You chose them first. You chose them to last. The musicians in Montage toast your taste.
What happens here to your new and now familiar favorites is something similar to what happens when white light passes through a prism and results in a rainbow.
It's something to feed dreams on. It paints a moon path on wide waters, leading to the edge of the world. Follow: you will learn where you are going when you get there. It spotlights your heart with the sun: return, and you are home.
It's something to dissolve forever any sad ghost of love that may have been haunting a heart where it once lived and long outstayed its welcome. It's something to show the ready heart previews of coming presents more bright than any memory.
It's something that happens without a word.
Magic? No . . . Montage.
MONTAGE. Mr. Webster says it well: producing a composite by combining several distinct elements . . . so that they blend with or into each other . . . superimposed or overlapping each other . . . images that revolve around each other or that rush one after the other to a sharp focus in the foreground . . .
Montage: vibes, flute, guitar, bass, drums . . . is compounded of rare and complex elements from the far shores of the widest ocean of the earth: Japan, Panama, Hawaii, Canada, the mainland U.S.A. The only thing more far out than where they come from is happening when these matchless musicians cross paths in Honolulu. It's not a jam session. It's not a busman's holiday. It's a Pacific trip . . . in the foreground:
SEIJI HIRAOKA. For citizens of the world, his name is enough. They know this man who, with his group, has just about taken up permanent residence in the most elegant showroom of the internationally famous Imperial Hotel in Toky. People in Hawaii also know him as the man instrumental in creating the sound of his friend Ohta--san's successful albums on the Surfside label. This much for openers.
"Genius of the vibes" he is called. You think he has double the usual equipment in the hands and heart departments. Soloist, conductor, composer, arranger . . . with imposing concert, club, film, TV, radio and recording credits . . . his field is music: classical, popular, jazz, whatever . . . as long as it's music.
This citizen of one of the world's great solos frequently with major orchestras . . . blows jazz to SRO crowds in major concert halls . . . writes songs that make number one in the nation . . . scores gold records as a performer. And he has composed and arranged music for x-tee motion pictures. His daily TV show is heading into the fifth year. Sometimes he is doing all of these things at once. A university degree in economics must have something to do with the way he budgets his time.
When you know the music of this man, all of this story can be told in two words: Seiji Hiraoke.
MAURICO SMITH. It is a rare musician who plays any style . . . many styles of music and plays them all pure. It is a rare musician, this flutist. It's like speaking several languages, without a foreign accent in any of them. This man from Panama can do both. His jazz, his Bach is Bach, he blows rock hard or Latin when that's what the song is . . . and each thing sounds like his favorite thing.
As for the flue and what it can do: what can it not do in the hands of Maurico Smith. It dreams, sighs, screams, flies . . . while audiences follow the action and the heart-stopping excitement of football fans watching a 90-yard touchdown run. It is easy to believe that the flute may have been somewhat overlooked as a solo instrument up to now, only because hardly anyone else can, or could, or did, or will, play it like this. The man blows his soul out of the end of that sterling silver tube and his hearers happily blow their minds.
He has appeared as featured soloist with a number of major symphony orchestras . . . with Mongo Santamaria, Chubby Checker, Machito, for some and more instances . . . and recently with Ohta-san, in the Canoe House of the Ilikai Hotel, where standing ovations saluted his first in-person appearance in Hawaii.
ON THE COVER: "Tiger" . . . a photograph that captures the three dimensional values of this one of the series of "Animal Songs" . . . embossed woodcuts issued in a limited edition, representing the Oriental astrological figures which name the Eastern years. The artist is Hakumaki, who has devised a style somewhere between the picture and the word.
Producer: Don McDiarmid, Jr. Engineer: Don Tyler. A&R: Ohta-san. Linear Notes: Jean Sullivan
Recorded in Hawaii at Commercial Recording Studios for Surfside Records, P.O. Box 2135, Honolulu, Hawaii 96805