CoronaVinyl Day 288 (H): Hiroshima by Hiroshima

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is "H," and I went with something a little into left field -- Hiroshima's self-titled 1979 debut album.

This is another one of those albums that I don't know when I acquired it, but presumably it was part of a larger lot of records.  Hiroshima is an American band formed in the late '70s by Dan Kuramoto, who at the time was the head of the Asian-American Studies department at Cal State Long Beach (aka Long Beach State).  He played music on the weekends and wanted to form a band that would do for Asian Americans what Santana did for Latinos.

The result was, like Santana, a large band that bent genres.  Their debut album is a combination of jazz, R&B, soft rock, world music, and funk, with an East Asian flair.  There are instrumentals and songs with vocals.  It's an interesting album, and it's certainly an album that could only have been made in the late '70s.  While it's not the kind of music I would typically gravitate towards, I didn't mind it.  I tended to like the instrumental songs more than the sung songs.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Lion Dance"
The album starts off with a nearly six-minute Santana-esque instrumental jam that has a nice guitar solo.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Taiko Song"
The final song on the album is an instrumental that is mostly funk, with some traditional Japanese interludes, which sounds weird, but it works.