Percy Faith recorded two albums of music by Japanese composers Masao Koga and Ryoichi Hattori. Both were released in Japan. My pressing of Koga Melodies was from CBS in Holland. For Koga Melodies, Faith won a CBS award for "Best International Project."
Koga and Hattori were likened to, perhaps, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers (this doesn't quite work, they were more contemporary). They wrote tunes that Percy Faith felt would be challenging to arrange in his style (with all the countermelodies and ideas that Faith added to the compositions of others). The liner notes of HATTORI indicate that Hattori was quite stunned at the complexity and richness that Faith brought to his work. The late Yukio Tanase lobbied hard to get the two albums reissued by CBS/Sony as a "2 on 1" CD years ago, but it never happened. Alan Bunting succeeded in convincing Taragon Records (Eliot Goshman) to publish Koga and Hattori as a 2-on-1 CD many years later; and it's a great opportunity to hear the Faith arrangements on music not heard on this CD (I had been sent a copy of the Masao Koga album in 1971 and was amazed that it was such a collection of fresh, beautiful melodies; this in spite of the cultural differences between the music of each country, Percy applied his touch and the results are well worth hearing, even though they are (gasp) unfamiliar tunes. You will get to like them! Percy's arrangements have always had the "power of perfection" and these albums are well worth hearing.