VAUGHAN, Sarah.

Description

December 1970 Japanese concert tour program

Original concert program produced for American jazz singer Sarah Vaughan’s December 1970 Japanese tour, presented by Universal Orient Promotions. The 11-date tour commenced at Tokyo’s Sankei Hall on Thursday, 3rd December, and ended at the Welfare Pension Hall in Osaka on Tuesday, 21st December, 1970. While the 1970 tour remains one of her most elusive live eras due to the lack of an officially packaged live commercial album, the structural and creative finer details of this run highlight its unique position in her history. A critical distinction of this specific trip is that Jan Hammer acted as her official Musical Director and Conductor on the road. Typically, Vaughan hired established, traditional Broadway-adjacent arrangers to conduct her charts. Trusting a raw, 22-year-old Czech refugee fresh out of Berklee to lead her rhythm section and handle the complex pacing of her show was a massive, progressive departure for “Sassy”. Besides Hammer, Vaughan was accompanied by drummer Jimmy Cobb and double bassist Gene Perla. It was Perla who was the driving force behind assembling this specific lineup, having brought the young Jan Hammer into Sassy’s fold during a pivotal year-long tenure in 1970. This fiery quartet performed notable engagements in Tokyo, including a documented live appearance at Sankei Hall on 17th December, 1970, alongside stays at the New Ohtani hotel. This configuration brought a much more aggressive, contemporary, and harmonically adventurous edge to Vaughan’s nightly accompaniment compared to her traditional Las Vegas-style backing bands of the prior decade. This specific late-1970 tour captured Jan Hammer right before his monumental leap into fusion history; shortly after finishing his year-long stint backing Sarah Vaughan, Hammer teamed up with John McLaughlin to form the original lineup of the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971.