Takeshi Kitayama -- Muteki no Sakaba （霧笛の酒場）

Tonight's "Uta Kon" (うたコン) was given the extra half-hour treatment and deservedly so since the theme of the night was the one-and-only Yu Aku（阿久悠）. This year happens to be the 10th anniversary of his passing so a good chunk of the music on display consisted of his works. It was truly a passage down the old Showa kayo.

I will get to a couple of those songs by Aku since they are tunes that I had never covered in the blog. However, as with many an episode of "Uta Kon", the last 10 minutes of the show were given over to some of the newer numbers, and there was one by Takeshi Kitayama（北山たけし）that caught my ears immediately.

Mood Kayo is a genre that I've often associated with the songs of yesteryear...long back into yesteryear. So it's always nice when I hear such a song that was created in the 21st century. Such is the case with Kitayama's latest single "Muteki no Sakaba" (Foghorn Bar) which came out in November 2016. I only found out about the release date from the YouTube description instead of the singer's J-Wiki page.

Written by Toshiya Niitani（仁井谷俊也）and composed by Koji Tokuhisa（徳久広司）, "Muteki no Sakaba", as the YouTube description notes, is the welcome throwback to the good ol' days of Showa Era kayo. I mean, as soon as I heard it, I felt like things time-slipped back to the heyday of Frank Nagai（フランク永井）and Yujiro Ishihara（石原裕次郎）. Ishihara especially would be looking down at Kitayama with a wink and a smile and two fingers of whiskey as he listened to that bluesy sax and the languid keyboards. Even the lyrics have that well-worn theme of love lost and the fellow crying in his sake.

Would love to hit an Akasaka bar right now but since I do not own a Platinum credit card...

(karaoke version)