Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

The New Year sumo tournament is heading into its final days now with yokozuna Asashoryu holding the lead at 11-1 and fellow yokozuna Hakuho lingering one step behind at 10-2. Hakuho just lost today to ozeki Harumafuji, but perhaps the most exciting match so far was yesterday’s face off between Asashoryu and sekiwake Baruto. See if you can tell who won from this photograph (link courtesy of Moti’s sumo news mailing list). Meanwhile, the sport’s backstage politics have hit the front pages, as former yokozuna Takanohana pursues his reform effort by seeking a spot on the Sumo Association’s board of directors.

Meanwhile, in another fine old Japanese cultural institution, the Emperor’s New Year waka poem for 2010 (source):

Where rays of sunlight
Filter through the trees I see
In the middle of the path
Carpeted with fallen leaves
A clump of green grass growing.

The assigned theme this year was “light.” Back in the old days, this would have been by definition the best poem of the year.

Although I have my doubts about the accuracy of the crowd count figure given, this article shows that legendary J-Rock band X-Japan can still pack them in, even in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Tokyo Shinbun newspaper is reporting (Japanese-language only) on the hit chart bounce enjoyed by artists featured on the NHK Kohakau Utagassen New Year’s Eve television spectacular. Ikimono Gakari’s “YELL/Joyful” (performed to great effect in the NHK broadcast with the backing of a choir of junior high school students) jumped from #23 to #12 on the Oricon charts the week after the show, while Kimura Kaera’s “Butterfly” moved up from the teens to the #1 slot on several music download sites, including I-Tunes Japan.

This has nothing to do with any of the above, but recently while wading through the Internet, I came across some amazing live performance of Iggy & The Stooges from 1970. Let’s call it “The Sweet Bloom of Youth.” Subtitle: “A Boy and his Peanut Butter.”

The Yomiuri newspaper is reporting (Japanese-language only) that legendary singer Asakawa Maki was found dead Sunday in a Nagoya hotel. She was 67 years old. A legendary, charismatic figure, she was the late 1960s “Queen of Underground Music.” Asakawa began appearing in Terayama Shuji’s experimental theatrical productions in 1968 and quickly became an icon of New Left culture. She released her debut album in 1970, featuring a melancholic singing style that combined jazz, blues, and chanson. Her persona coupled a cool, mysterious sexiness with searing intelligence. Asakawa always dressed in black and was usually surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke (or at least, that was the image). She continued to perform and record regularly over the decades and was in Nagoya this weekend for live appearances at a jazz club there.

R.I.P.

I’ve been working this week on the section on Arai Yumi (a.k.a. Matsutoya Yumi or simply Yuming) for my book on postwar popular music in Japan. Today, while looking for something else, I stumbled upon a remarkable cover version of a Yuming tune by one of my favorite contemporary J-Pop singers.

The song is “Kageriyuku heya” (something like “The darkening room”). First released as a single in 1976 — her last record, in fact, before she married Matsutoya Masataka and changed her name — it’s one of Yuming’s best compositions, inlaid with chord progressions reminscent of classical music. In fact, it all sounds a bit like a hymn, from the pipe organ opening to the swelling chorus on the backing vocals. Here’s the original version, in case you aren’t familiar with it. It’s one of the great moments in mid-1970s Japanese pop.

The cover version I discovered today is by none other than Shiina Ringo, with whom I’ve been pretty heavily infatuated for the last six or seven years. Shiina respects the song’s essential structure, but nonetheless manages to make it entirely her own. The recording comes from Dear Yuming, a 1999 tribute album.

The Wall Street Journal recently discovered that Tokyo is just about the best place on earth to be a jazz fan. John Kirch surveys the delights available there–the coffeeshops, the live houses, the bars– and concludes,

If jazz is America’s gift to the world, Japan is the place that knows how to unwrap it. While serious musicians and devotees fret that traditional, noncommercialized improvisation is becoming as esoteric a taste as it is in the land of its birth, jazz in all its forms still pulses through Tokyo. Sixty years after this vibrant U.S. export began to take hold, it’s piped into hotel lobbies as a marker of elegance and sophistication, blasted from dingy basement dives in unlikely neighborhoods, spun by club DJs and obsessional bar owners and hawked in innumerable specialty record shops. In Tokyo you can hear jazz of stunning, nearly offhand virtuosity played in clubs that range from among the world’s smallest to among its most expensive.

All true. Tokyo may be the best jazz city on earth, but Chicago isn’t far behind. Howard Mandel in his “Jazz Beyond Jazz” blog has anointed us America’s best jazz town.

Jazz is the lifeblood of Chicago in a way it ain’t in NYC, at least not right now. Jazz-soul-blues is Chicago’s street music. Chicago’s citizens — not just its visitors — seem to consider jazz this music their personal due. It’s what you hear at O’Hare going in and out of town.

He’s right, I think. If you want proof, just check out the amazing Hyde Park Jazz festival that will take place this coming weekend.

If a tie-breaker is needed, let me offer up this recent article from the Telegraph newspaper (UK), reaffirming the Chicago Symphony’s status as America’s best orchestra.

And did I mention the blues?

While Tokyo gets hit with an earthquake a day, here in Chicago I find myself buried under a mountain (slagheap?) of copyediting, recommendation letter writing, etc. I’m trying to find a bit of time each day to work on the last unfinished chapter of my book manuscript on postwar popular music (the chapter on 1970s “New Music”), but it’s slow going.

Over at Japan Focus, R. Taggart Murphy has a fine new article on the current economic crisis and the changes it bodes for U.S., Japan, and China relations as Beijing replaces Tokyo as the primary purchaser of American debt. He writes that “a world in which the primary external support for the US dollar comes from China rather than Japan is going to be very different from that to which policy makers in Washington and Tokyo have become accustomed over the past half century.” It is a moment of truth for Japan, one potentially disastrous but also, Murphy argues, one that might provide the opportunity to rebuild its social contract on a more sustainable basis. In that vein, Murphy expresses hope for the upcoming election.

Meanwhile, this month on his “Ongaku no Tora-san” television show, Southern All Stars leader Kuwata Keisuku has revealed a hitherto unsuspected literary bent. He’s taking the classics of modern Japanese literature and transforming them into the lyrics for pop songs. Among the victims are Natsume Soseki’s Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), Kobayashi Takiji’s Kani Kosen (Cannery Boat), and the following medley, which includes Nakahara Chuya, Dazai Osamu, and Yosano Akiko.

Shiina Ringo, Sanmon Gossip 「三文ゴッシップ」 (EMI, 2009). Shiina tries to merge her early noise-pop sound with her most recent jazz bent, with mixed results. She channels the Jackson 5’s “ABC” on “Rôdôsha,” and her inner Edith Piaf comes out on “Bonsai hada.” My favorite track is the rocker “Yokyô,” but there aren’t any really classic Ringo tunes here: nothing cuts straight through to your inner chaos the way her best work does. It’s still several cuts above the usual J-Pop standard, but it leaves me hoping for a return to form on her next work, either solo or with her band Tokyo Jihen.

Dee Alexander, Wild is the Wind (Blujazz, 2008). Alexander is a local Chicago jazz singer—but not for long. This CD doesn’t quite capture the marvel that is one of her live performances, but it still managed to garner a five-star review from Downbeat magazine and is now attracting lots of attention in Europe. It’s not just that she possesses remarkably true pitch: her music burns with intelligence and passion, and she explores a whole range of vocal sounds.

Black Blondie, Do You Remember Who You Wanted to Be (Black Blondie, 2009). Self-produced debut CD by a mostly female group from Minneapolis. They cross hiphop with R&B, avant-garde pop, and jazz, and end up sounding nothing like anyone else. The lead track “Hunger” is very strong (you can stream it at their MySpace page), as is the reggae-styled “Dressed to Kill a Mockingbird”; the rest of the material is uneven, but always distinctive. A group worth watching in the coming years.

Inoue Takayuki, It’s Never Too Late (Sony, 2007). Solo work by former Spiders lead guitarist, originally released back in 1981. Recorded in England, it features local session musicians, including Mick Taylor as guest on several tracks. It’s pretty standard late 1970s guitar-boogie rock, with a few instrumentals thrown in (Inoue composed the hit instrumental theme song for the 1970s television show “Taiyô ni hoero”).

Ray Davies with The Crouch End Festival Chorus, The Kinks Choral Collection (Universal, 2009). Re-recordings of a dozen Kinks’ classics given full choral treatment. It works on some of the songs quite well—“Shangri-La,” for example, as well as the suite of songs collected here as “Village Green Medley,” all taken from the classic 1968 Village Green Preservation Society album. On some of the others, I find myself wishing for a more imaginative use of the vocal resources, as well as a few more oddball song selections. How ‘bout something from Muswell Hillbillies, for example? Then again, I could listen to “You Really Got Me” played on dueling tubas and still enjoy it, and in fact it provides one of the more thoughtful uses of the choir here (though I can’t help wondering what it would have sounded like if they handed off the guitar solo to the singers and allowed them to go wild with it). The U.S. version will be released in September.

One of my favorite hooks in recent pop music comes near the end of Tokyo Jihen’s “Superstar.” About three-quarters of the way through the song, there’s a tiny pause that’s about eight months pregnant, and then Shiina Ringo finally drops the title word, holding it for almost three bars. In the meanwhile, the band shifts into overdrive: they flip the chords over, and for the rest of the song, it’s all power strumming, squealing guitar solo, and madman drumming, ala The Who. Up to that moment, it’s been a pretty good pop song, but with the hook, it suddenly blasts off into the stratosphere.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any promo videos or on-line mp3 files of the original studio recording, which is on the Adult album (2006). Here’s a pretty fair live version–except that they blow the hook (right around 3:20), which only goes to show you how hard it must have been to produce that bit in the studio version.

Anyhow, what prompted me to revisit this hook was that after spending a fair amount of time listening to Shiina Ringo’s new CD, Sanmon Gossip, I started trawling YouTube to wallow in her fabulous back catalog. I stumbled upon the following piece of video, which I found utterly fascinating. It shows her and the band in the studio, painstakingly working out the details of that amazing hook from “Superstar.” Nice chance to watch a genius at work….

The plan on this 4th of July is to head downtown later to hear Booker T’s set at the Taste of Chicago. What could be more patriotic than wolfing down Chicago-style dogs while grooving to “Green Onions” on Independence Day?

In the meanwhile, the brilliant Sheena Ringo has a new album out in Japan, Sanmon Goshippu. The Japan Times doesn’t like it much: check out their review here. Theｙ complain that the new CD doesn’t sound much like her early brilliant solo work, but this somehow becomes a sign that Sheena is repeating herself. Having not heard the new album yet, I can’t say much (my copy is on order), but given the reviewer’s dismissal of Sheena’s fine band Tokyo Jihen, I doubt we’ll agree on much else.

Finally, the Asahi newspaper is reporting (Japanese-language only) that a new notebook has surfaced in which Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) collected haiku composed by himself and other members of his circle, including Natsume Soseki, Takahama Kyoshi, and many others. Many of the poems included in it have not previously been published. If you’re still searching for that topic for your dissertation in Japanese literature….

Sôtaisei Riron, Haifai shinsho 「ハイファイ新書」 (2009, Mirai). Second album by up-and-coming Japanese indies band, it reached #7 on the Oricon album charts earlier this year. Mabe Shûichi’s original compositions contain hints of jazz and fusion, especially in the off-kilter guitar work. What really makes the band stand out, though, are the whispery, girlish vocals by Yakushimaru Etsuko. The lyrics often contain clever wordplay, but aren’t especially profound. Not perfect, but certainly a band worth watching in the coming years.

“Monsieur” Kamayatsu Hirsoshi, 1939 Monsieur: Monsieur Kamayatsu 70th Anniversary Album 「ムッシュかまやつ 70thアニバーサリーアルバム」 (2009, avex). An even more recent updating of the Monsieur Kamayatsu legend, this time commemorating the great man’s 70th birthday. It features him in duets with musicians of many different generations, revisiting songs from across his long career, stretching from “Ban Ban Ban,” his 1966 hit with The Spiders in a nice punky version here with Hitoto Yô, to “Gauloise o sutta koto ga aru kai” (see below) in a duet with Micro. Other guests include fellow Spiders Sakai Masaaki and Inoue Jun, Thomas Matsumoto, The Alfee, Moriyama Ryôko, Imai Miki, and Hotei Tomoyasu, among others. There’s no point in my hoping I sound this good when I’m 70, since I didn’t sound this good when I was 18. Very nice.

“Monsieur” Kamayatsu Hiroshi, Gauloise (1994, Polystar). Terrific updating of the Monsieur Kamayatsu sound recorded in England under the production supervision of Oyamada Keigo (Cornelius), with first-rate British session musicians. Kamayatsu’s original 1974 recording of “Gauloise o sutta koto ga aru kai,” on which he was backed by Tower of Power, became an unlikely hit in British clubs in the early 1990s, prompting Oyamada to bring the man back into the recording studio.

Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horns and Strings; Les Illuminations; Nocturne, Ian Bostridge, Berlin Philharmoniker (2005, EMI). Nice recordings of three of Britten’s extended vocal compositions.

Back in Chicago now, I’m happy to report that the inimitable Shiina Ringo has a new single out (and a new album on the way next month). “Ariamaru tomi” （「ありあまる富」）is a mid-tempo number very much in her characteristic style, including an extended, complex coda. It’s also the theme song for the current hit TV series “Smile.” The song is currently #2 on I-Tunes Japan.　　Here’s the video: