Yutaka Kimura Speaks: Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）

 

The works of Tatsuro Yamashita in the 1970s can be considered to be "style-oriented". That style was wrapped around a 16-beat structure and was funky to be sure, but at the same time, the melody was selected through collaboration with other musicians as if from a producer's point of view, leading to the albums that he created. It was this rationalism of his that sparked Charles Calello, who had an up-close-and-personal relationship in the recording of "Circus Town", to state that Yamashita went about things like a true professional. It was this methodology of competing with the sounds of the time that steadily gathered support within the music scene that finally led to his breakthrough album of 1980, "Ride on Time".

Yamashita, after his 1983 "Melodies", took an even bigger singer-songwriter approach, releasing music such as the huge standard "Christmas Eve", and achieved an unshakeable position in the Japanese world of pop music. As everyone knows, the fact that he is still around is due to the respect that he's earned from the steady work of quality of a higher degree for any album that he's involved in. 

Well, when making the selections for this book, what I was most surprised about was how frequently he participated in recording sessions. He was especially no slouch when it came to his workload in the 1970s, but of particular note is that a lot of it involved him in background chorus work. At the time, he was focused on chorus; moreover, he himself commented that he had been highly valued because there was no one else who was good at falsetto. Within Japan's pop scene, his level of contribution when it came to his brand of harmony pop after the birth of rock-and-roll (Beach Boys, Four Seasons, doo wop in general, etc.) should be remembered in large part alongside his own solo work. 

In this book, a lot of the works where his session work can be enjoyed have a large following. I hope that you can give these a try as well.

The above comes from "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020).