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.

Friday, November 15, 2019

Issei Okamoto -- Moonlight Singing(ムーンライト・シンギィング)


Nope, sorry...not much of a moon picture but that's the best that I could do.

(8:07)

I found this one on the YouTube channel for Kimi no Station recently, and it's the July 1978 debut album for the current composer Akira Okamoto(岡本朗), "Moonlight Singing". Back then, he was known as Issei Okamoto(岡本一生), hailing from the city of Kure in Hiroshima Prefecture. From the tracks that I've listened to so far, it looks like he was going for some of the more modern genres of the time such as New Music, AOR and City Pop.

His first single, also titled "Moonlight Singing", had come out a couple of months earlier in May. This is more of the classy-night-on-Long-Island type of jazz...pretty nice for a quiet Friday evening, and I couldn't help but feel that there was something (not exact, though) of the Japanese version of Bobby Caldwell in Okamoto's delivery. Methinks that if he had actually performed this on some sort of variety show, he would have been in black tie and tails with a dance partner on stage....rather a different image than the one shown on the cover for the album.

Up to this point, according to his J-Wiki profile, he's released 3 singles and 3 albums. As a composer under both of his names, he's provided music for a number of other artists such as Hiromi Ohta(太田裕美), Miki Matsubara(松原みき)and Hideki Saijo(西城秀樹).

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