Mint Jams


Mint Jams is a live album by Japanese jazz fusion band Casiopea, released on May 21, 1982 by Alfa Records. The album's title is an arrangement of the band members' first and last initials. This album is widely considered to be Casiopea's best, as it combines their live dynamism and precision with careful studio work.

Background and recording

As Alfa Records expanded into Europe, it was planned to produce an album for Europe by one of its artists, Casiopea. Initially, it was planned to be a compilation of songs from previous albums, but was later turned into a live album. Mint Jams was also Casiopea's first album to mainly feature the Yamaha GS-1 FM synthesizer, played by Minoru Mukaiya; this synthesizer was subsequently used in many of their live performances.
Live sound recordings from a two-day performance at Tokyo Kaikan were used and subsequently remixed at Alfa Studio 'A' by Shunsuke Miyazami, Satoshi Nakao, Norio Yoshizawa, and Atsushi Saito. The songs were arranged in advance with studio work in mind. To achieve the likeness of a studio quality sound, the audience noise from the Chuo Kaikan live performances were cut from the mix, except for during the bass guitar and drum solos in "Domino Line", and the latter-half part of "Swear" which include the drum and piano solo. There were many changes in the arrangements in post-production: "Tears of the Star" had a removed 30-second intro, "Domino Line" has bass and drum solos from both concert dates, the outro for "Swear" was cut by 40 seconds, "Midnight Rendezvous" had clap sound effects added, and "Time Limit" had more than a minute removed.
Besides the title of the album being an arrangement of the band members' first and last initials, it uses the word "mint" to imply a "mint condition" and "high performance". The word "jams" describe their live performance of which the source material was taken from.
The European version of Mint Jams was released the same year as the Japanese release. The following year, in 1983, when Casiopea visited London to record the album Jive Jive, a promotional live concert was held.

Track listing

Personnel

Casiopea:
Production:

Full setlist

Aside from Casiopea Perfect Live II, all Casiopea lives officially released are cut.
Some songs are missing from the official release, some are not in the right order and some are shorter. "Galactic Funk" and "Tears of the Star" were played with special intros, whilst "Eyes of the Mind" and "Ayasake" were filmed as part of the album's initial promotion but as of now, hasn't seen any official video releases.