Boz Scaggs – Endless Night To Osaka (Tarantura TCDBS-2)

Endless Night To Osaka (Tarantura TCDBS-2)

Festival Hall, Osaka, Japan – February 5th, 1978

Harbor Lights, Whatcha Gonna Tell Your Man, Full-Lock Power Slide, Runnin’ Blue, Hollywood, Jump Street, We’re All Alone, It’s Over, Gimme The Goods, Lido Shuffle, Slow Dancer, Band Introduction, Cause You’re Mine, I Got Your Number(audience recording)

Endless Night To Osaka comes from an excellent soundboard recording from Boz Scaggs’ 1978 tour of Japan. The overall mix is great with just a few slightly unbalanced moments. To me, it sounds like a true soundboard tape and not from a broadcast. The audience is very faint and can barely be heard between songs. By the sound of the band you can tell the musicians are top notch. Boz is joined by Michael Landau on guitar, Peter Leitch and Scott Shelley on keyboards, Dean Cortez on bass, Kelly Shanahan on drums, Lenny Castro on percussion, John Madrid on trumpet, Adrian Tapia on saxophone, and lastly Paulette Brown and Venetta Fields on backing vocals.

Around this time, Boz Scaggs was producing a lot of jazzy R&B music which he had some success with on the airwaves. Most of the tracks featured on this tour come from 1976’s Silk Degrees which reached #2 in the U.S. with three hits cracking the top 40 and 1977’s Down Two Then Left. “Harbor Lights” starts the show off very slow but picks up into a Latin style groove to finish and contains a solo on flugelhorn.

“Runnin’ Blue” from the Boz Scaggs & Band LP is a highlight and has that Late Night talk show groove featuring some good horns, B3, and some standout licks from Landau. “We’re All Alone” is a tune penned by Scaggs and covered by a few different artists but was best suited for Rita Coolidge who had a hit with it in 1977. “Lido Shuffle” is easily Boz’s most recognizable tune. While it reached #11 on the charts in the U.S. I was surprised to see that “Lowdown”, a bigger hit at #3, wasn’t in the set considering it earned him a Grammy Award in 1976 for Best R&B song. Perhaps this isn’t the full show.

The cover states Original Master Cassette from Mr. Peach and the bonus poster included with this set has a picture of the tape. Considering this is a soundboard recording I am pretty sure they are referring to the final track “I Got Your Number” which comes from a good and very listenable audience source. Tarantura released Endless Night To Osaka in March 2008 and for the Boz Scaggs fan this is a title definitely worth owning.