One of the songs featured in the Tokyo live shows was “Day Tripper,” originally released as a single around the world the previous December. As he introduces the number, John isn’t quite certain if it was released in Japan as a single, and he gives a very awkward impression of spoken Japanese, but no one in the audience seems to mind.

Also in the audience for the Tokyo concerts were members of The Spiders, one of the top Group Sounds bands. In fact, they had famously turned down an invitation to appear as an opening act for The Beatles in those Tokyo concerts. The Spiders were one of the first Japanese groups really to “get” The Beatles, after their chief songwriter Kamayatsu Hiroshi discovered a copy of the Meet the Beatles LP at the American Pharmacy in Tokyo in early 1964. They were famous for inserting new Beatles’ singles into their live act even before the original records had had the chance to climb the charts.

The Spiders recorded many covers of Beatles’ songs on their own albums. One of the best is, in fact, their version of “Day Tripper,” included on The Spiders Album No. 5 (1968). The Spiders were so hip that their cover version is based less on the original Beatles’ recording than on Otis Redding’s marvelous soulified take on the number: the famous guitar hook fades away, replaced by a very funky organ riff and The Spiders topped this off with some nifty Group Sounds choreography. Here’s video from a wonderful 1981 reunion gig:

The Spiders weren’t the last Japanese rock band to record the number, either. In 1979, Yellow Magic Orchestra released an industrial-grunge, postmodern take on the song, one that is as inventive as any of the other recorded versions (including The Beatles’). Moreover, YMO’s version is clearly rooted in The Spiders’ take on the song. Drummer Takahashi Yukihiro’s vocals are run through a filter that makes him sound like an android, the tune decays at key points into metal machine music, and what we are left with is an ironic undermining of the whole teenage pop concept. Very cool. Here are YMO performing it live in NYC in 1979.

YMO will be playing a reunion gig in Tokyo this summer when I’m there, and I’m debating myself over whether I should go. Do you think they’ll play “Day Tripper”?

Ugaya Hiromichi, J-Poppu to wa nani ka: Kyodaika suru ongaku sangyo (What is J-Pop? The expanding music industry, 2005). A provocative study of the music business in Japan since the late 1980s, when marketing executives coined the word “J-Pop” to suggest the appearance of a Japanese pop music scene that could compete on an international basis. Ugaya isn’t as interested in musicians as he is in the business, technological, and marketing sides of the industry. He shows, for example, how the switchover to the CD format (along with the rise of inexpensive CD players) transformed the gender and age demographics of the music-buying audience in Japan.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1816). In which a British female writer tells us what women really want. It’s amazing how contemporary Austen’s characters remain, despite the now-archaic nature of the world they occupy. Differences of birth or class are both overcome and reinforced (just like today!), and of course the colonies hover in the background: the widowed Mrs. Smith gets her happy ending when her rights over her late husband’s estate in the West Indies are recognized. No wonder Natsume Soseki loved her writing so much. A fine novel to begin the summer with.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (1998). In which a British male writer tells us what men really want. Hornby’s comic memoir of his life-long obsession with soccer seemed a good choice to accompany this year’s World Cup. As usual with Hornby, it’s inlaid with countless funny, poignant observations–e.g.:

The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?

After lunch, we had a panel on “Radical Visual Culture in 1960s Japan” with Jonathan Hall (Pomona College) situating Okabe Michio’s remarkable 1968 film Crazy Love in dialogue with Susan Sontag’s writings on camp, William Marotti (UCLA) on the significance of early 1960s avant garde musical performances by the Group Ongaku, and Miryam Sas (University of California-Berkeley) on a variety of experimental animated films from the period.

Our last panel covered “Music in Film,” with Daniel Johnson (University of Chicago graduate student) looking at changing modes for representing romance/sex and sentiment/irony in Nikkatsu action films, Michael Raine (University of Chicago) discussing how we might rethink the practices of reading that 1960s popular films seem to suggest as their proper modes of use, and Junko Yamazaki (University of Chicago graduate student) on the use of avant garde musical forms in the film soundtracks composed by Mayuzumi Toshiro.

The conference ended with a screening of the remarkable 1964 Toho musical, Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru (You too can get ahead!, dir. Sugawa Eizo), a marvelous film that brings together many of the themes we had been talking about over the course of the conference. It was a stimulating, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting two days, and I’m grateful to all of the participants and to all of my colleagues for making it possible.

Here’s a trailer for Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru:

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.”

R.I.P.

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.

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?

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.

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….