I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
Listening to "Travelin' Heart", I thought of this as a resort tune reminiscent of the Fifth Dimension's"Up Up and Away" when right in the middle of the song, the chorus of "Up Up and Away" popped up! Through Tomofumi Suzuki's（鈴木智文）meticulous production and Noda's（野田幹子）classy vocals, this is a refreshing song to the ears and it's reminiscent of the resort pop at the time of her debut which had a fresh impression even in the 1990s.
The above comes from "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020).
Yes, once again, we have Kayo Grace Kyoku tripping the light fantastic at the good ol' disco somewhere probably in Tokyo.
Speaking of disco, Rocket Brown let me know about this tune by vocal group The Gospellers（ゴスペラーズ）several weeks ago. "Fly Me to the Disco Ball" is the group's 49th single from February 2017. Despite the title, it doesn't have a single disco bone in its arrangement, and in fact, I think it's a rather elegant and inspiring soul tune. Written and composed by Gospellers singer Yuuji Sakai（酒井雄二）with a co-composing credit given to Shoichiro Hirata（平田祥一郎）, the J-Wiki writeup on the song noted Sakai's comments that "Fly Me to the Disco Ball" is reflecting the human desire to fly in spite of being bound by gravity.
The music video certainly has folks in the late evening trying to slip their earthly bounds and reach for the stars...or the disco ball. Or maybe that's simply the booze talking. Regardless, "Fly Me to the Disco Ball" made it to No. 14 on Oricon and can also be found on The Gospellers' No. 5-ranking"Soul Renaissance", their 15th album which was released a month following the single.
The song was also used as the theme for the amusement park Yomiuri Land's"Jewellumination"（ジュエルミネーション） display.
The above is Chikuzen Sato's（佐藤竹善）first foray into his "Cornerstones" set of solo albums which first came out in 1995, so if he's going to be releasing another one next year, the lead singer behind Sing Like Talking will be celebrating his 30th anniversary with his pet project of cover tunes. Unfortunately at this point, I only have his first one.
His eighth album from the series, "radio JAOR ～Cornerstones 8～" was released back in October 2022. I was able to find this one track which is a cover of Junichi Inagaki's（稲垣潤一）1982 debut single"Ame no Regret"(Rainy Regret) which was written by Reiko Yukawa（湯川れい子）and composed by Off-Course member Kazuhiko Matsuo（松尾一彦）.
The arrangement isn't all that different from the Inagaki original (and I just posted something about him yesterday) aside from some steelier synthesizers, and I think Sato may have tried to emulate Inagaki's delivery to a fault. I've been accustomed to the laidback crooning of Inagaki but Sato is one singer who I've known and admired for his boppier and soulful vocals so to hear him fairly drone out that first verse was a tad jarring, I have to admit. However by the end, it was the good ol' Sato making himself heard again. The album, by the way, reached No. 22 on Oricon.
If I'm not mistaken, the above shot is from one of the Sumida River ferries heading from Asakusa down to Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. Always putting up those condo buildings there.
Let's go further into Urban Contemporary Friday on KKP with "For a Week Story" by the pop duo sister act Milk with Ritsuko and Rie Miyajima（宮島律子・宮島理恵）. This was the first track on their 1987 album"Milk" and it was the A-side for the "For a Week Story" EP which also contained the previous song I posted, "Manazashi ni I feel so love"（視線にI feel so love）.
"For a Week Story" starts the vibe off for Milk's album and it takes off on a cool but also calm and collected strut down the street...kinda like Slow Jack Swing rather than New Jack Swing. I like the boogie beat and the beefy saxophone that accompanies the ladies on their night on the town. Rie Miyajima was in charge of words and music here.
Hello again. This is J-Canuck and continuing on from Part 1 of a translation I'm doing for Toshikazu Kanazawa's（金澤寿和）liner notes from Tohoku Shinkansen's（東北新幹線）"Thru Traffic" album from 1982, I'm providing Part 2 which will begin the original 2007 liner notes when the classic City Pop release was put onto CD for the very first time. This part mostly covers the history of Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）and Hiroshi Narumi（鳴海寛）up to the point where they met at the Yamaha Music Foundation.
Tohoku Shinkansen’s genesis can be attributed to the Yamaha Music Foundation known for its Popular Song Contest (abbreviated as Pop Con). The first one of the duo to enter Yamaha was Etsuko Yamakawa, born in Kyoto, growing up with classical music and majoring in vocal music at university. During elementary school, Yamakawa listened to Group Sounds music and then also got into Western pop hits. From an early age, she was able to learn music by ear and played it on instruments like the piano. From high school, she aimed for a career in music and even participated in Pop Con at the recommendation of a friend, but it was from that point that she preferred to be an arranger rather than a performer.
While attending university in Tokyo, Yamakawa managed to get a part-time job at the Yamaha Music Foundation. At first, she was doing office work and serving tea while getting to know the staff in the Creative Work section in the company, also known as the Lab. It was there that she met the big-time arrangers such as Mitsuo Hagita（萩田光雄）, Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）and Osamu Totsuka（戸塚修）. As she was doing her routine tasks, she would sneak a peek at the scores they had written, and little by little, she would pick up on their methods and techniques. Before long, she would get involved with the popular radio show “Cocky Pop” sponsored by Yamaha and that is where she first met Hiroshi Narumi. Narumi had still been a high school student at the time but his innate talents had already been recognized and it was one of his compositions that had been used as the theme song for the radio show. She eventually got a copy of his demo tape and his transcriptions.
“This guy’s amazing for a high school kid!” she said.
On Narumi’s homemade tape, he had recorded his own overdubbed chorus onto his performance by piano. And when she listened to the sound of his beautiful music, there were these complex chords everywhere that she had never heard before. That was the first step for the two of them.
Narumi’s roots were in Beethoven. Furthermore, for three years from kindergarten to Grade 1 of elementary school, he listened only to the master’s “Moonlight Sonata” everyday without fail as if he were a boy possessed, a feat which astonished everyone. But it was this singular experience that nurtured his amazing ear and well-honed sensitivity. His piano playing was described by his elder brother as something by a child prodigy, and it’s said that Hiroshi memorized his brother’s own piano playing completely by ear. And when his brother started taking up guitar in Grade 3, Hiroshi also somehow began picking it up as well; while he was copying what he saw on televised guitar lessons, he was able to play the instrument in no time flat. In junior high school, Hiroshi was turned onto the pop music of Bread, Carpenters, Burt Bacharach, and The Fifth Dimension. Soon after that, his interest spread to Philadelphia Soul, Stevie Wonder and Al Green, and then on radio, he started listening to Sonia Rosa and as he unraveled the riddle behind her mysterious attraction, he came across Joao Gilberto. While his friends got into raunchy rock, he preferred soft pop and soul. He analyzed the skillfulness of the chord progressions and the precision of their arrangements and then embedded them into his own music over time. Then for his original compositions, he did the dubbing over and over by himself at home for his demo tape over many days. Narumi is widely recognized as a guitarist, but he himself believes he’s adept at both guitar and piano. Whenever he went to the piano after getting worked up, the agitation and his soul tended to cool down.
I caught this Goro Noguchi（野口五郎）single on an episode of "Yoru no Hit Studio"（夜のヒットスタジオ）a few weeks ago. To be honest, I didn't pay too much attention to it when he sang it on stage, but listening to the original recorded version paid some more dividends to me.
"Musashino Shijin" (The Poet of Musashino) was Noguchi's 22nd single from January 1977. Written by Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）, composed by Noguchi's older brother Hiroshi Sato（佐藤寛...not to be confused with the late City Pop keyboardist and singer） and arranged by Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）, it starts out for a few seconds sounding like a rock tune but then slides into something more wistful and perhaps approaching the feeling of a City Pop song. Actually, the story of the song was based on Inokashira Park which straddles the districts of Musashino and Mitaka in Tokyo, so I guess with that in mind and along with that funky beat, perhaps it can be a City Pop song. Noguchi was heading in that direction anyways.
Strangely enough though, according to the J-Wiki article on "Musashino Shijin", Matsumoto's lyrics actually refer to Musashino Park located in another area of Tokyo. I can only gather that the name of Musashino sounded better to Matsumoto than Inokashira. Regardless, his lyrics refer to the titular poet as a young man who began, experienced and ended a love affair around the park, and he's rather dramatically dressing it up as a song, poem or scene from a movie. Quite the drama king, isn't he?
"Musashino Shijin" made it all the way up to No. 2 on Oricon, eventually becoming the 33rd-ranked single of 1977. The video below shows Inokashira Park in all of its glory. I only went there once myself during my days in Tokyo. I'm sure that the park is always buzzing with people during cherry blossom season.
I've often called crooning drummer and singer Junichi Inagaki（稲垣潤一）one of the princes of City Pop all these years, and he definitely has the flair for the urban contemporary.
However, I've also realized that Inagaki, through listening to his music, also has a love for the pop inspired from the 1950s and 1960s. I think one example is his "Memory Flickers", the penultimate track from his April 1989 album"Heart & Soul". The No. 1-ranking release has been labeled a City Pop album but "Memory Flickers" feels more like an homage to those earlier decades although the music seems to have been filtered as well through contemporary arrangements and synths.
Written by Masao Urino（売野雅勇）, those opening notes of "Memory Flickers" resemble the notes in the intro of Anri's（杏里）classic "Kanashimi ga Tomaranai" (悲しみがとまらない）, and perhaps this shouldn't be surprising since both songs were composed by the one-and-only Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）. Beyond those introductory bars though, Hayashi's arrangements take us through a mix of thrumming keyboards and what sounds like some Motown spice. Urino's lyrics talk about a man reminiscing about a love triangle years or decades ago in which he was one of the corners competing against one male corner for the hand of a female corner. Not sure who won but I get the feeling that the main man is feeling rather bittersweet about the experience. In any case, "Heart & Soul" ended 1989 as the 47th-ranked album.
