Ryo Kawasaki & The Golden Dragon Live 1980 Part II - Midnight Fire Engine
RYO KAWASAKI

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This is a sneak preview of Ryo's Golden Drangon live at Pit-Inn 1980 Part II scheduled to be released in July 2020. This album will showcase Ryo's guitar synthesizer sounds and acoustic guitar playing more in depth compare to the original release in 1980. Enjoy!

Technical and historical notes for "live" by Ryo Kawasaki and The Golden Dragon.

The album "Live" was recorded at legendary jazz club "Pit-Inn" in Roppongi Tokyo Japan in 1980.

The club was located at the basement of Sony studio, so it was a perfect location to try one of the first live Digital recordings using the first Sony PCM digital 2 track recorder which was just developed and installed in Sony Studio(please remember that CD or Dat did not even existed in 1980!).

So, engineers wired necessary cables connected from the club to the recording studio including various video cameras which enable recording engineer to see what's going on at the club and also be able to communicate with performers through earphones located in each performers' ears.

Ryo Kawasaki and The Golden Dragon was chosen as performers for this historical event.

Also, note worthy is that this is probably one of the first and rare events that actually any guitarist in the history extensively used guitar synthesizer in live performance and to be printed on the album.

Ryo brought his own hand made 500lbs guitar synthesizer all the way from US to Japan to exhibit his invention. The cost to ship this equipment was $2,000 which was more than caring one musician in economy class using air plane at that time.

In addition, Japanese customs refused to release this cargo because it required through investigation to prove that this equipment is not newly developed weapon until at the opening date of the engagement.

So, executive at Sony records and Ryo had to go to the airport with bunch of paper works to prove that it was an musical equipment and not a weapon.

After more than few hours of conference with customs, finally they granted to release this new weapon(?) which was only two hours before the opening of the show. And it took another one and half hours drive to get the equipment to the club.

Ryo patched all the necessary wires in 30 minutes before the show and here is what happened.

Enjoy your time travel through 1980 to 2020!