Kazumasa Akiyama -- Dig My Style

Discovered another new and fun musician tonight. He's called Kazumasa Akiyama（秋山一将）and he's a jazz guitarist who started with 2 albums in the 1970s: "Dig My Style" (1978) and "Beyond the Door" (1979).

The title track from "Dig My Style" is an enjoyable slice of light funk n' fusion with Akiyama himself providing the vocals (pretty nice English there). It would be nice to strut down the main street of either Shinjuku or Roppongi to this one. I'm not sure who Akiyama modeled himself on but his guitar sounds somewhat like George Benson near the end.

Akiyama doesn't have a J-Wiki entry but he has his own website. From there, I found out he was born in 1955 and starting learning the guitar by himself at the age of 10. He listened to a lot of the Beatles and Ray Charles and then started getting into jazz. After several years of performing in various groups with artists such as jazz drummer Motohiko Hino（日野元彦）and singer Yasuko Agawa（阿川泰子）, he released a couple of more albums in the 2000s: "Quiet Storm" (2005) and "Dr. Rain" (2008).

I was looking at the cast of musicians for "Dig My Style", and it turns out one of the backup singers was Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）who has already been mentioned for that other new and fun group I wrote about last night.