The wonderful thing about singer-songwriter Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）is that throughout the decades of her career, she's been able to transition from genre to genre with aplomb. There were her New Music/City Pop years in the late 1970s and then the switch to a more technopop/French sound going into the 1980s.
I don't know as much of her 90s material but from what I've heard from her during the final decade of the 20th century is much more laidback, stripped back and focused on an earthier sound through instruments including exotic percussion. In 1995, Ohnuki released her 17th album "TCHOU", a release that was recorded in Brazil for the first time for her. She and Shigeki Miyata（宮田茂樹）co-produced the project and though a lot of the tracks were created by the former, there are songs on "TCHOU" which were created by Brazilian artists including Gilberto Gil and the late Oscar Castro-Neves.
One of the track is "Japão" which was written by Gil and composed by Joao Donato and it is a Brazilian love letter to Ohnuki's nation. She dreamily sings of mountain-surrounded hometowns, moonlit islands and a most genteel lifestyle there. We can leave Tokyo out of this one...which I'm sure the singer probably loved to do. It's all very comfortable and old-fashioned at the same time.
This is a very unique song.
ReplyDelete