Jun Miyake -- A Thoughtful Touch

 

It's about 4:20 pm as I start typing this and the sun is already pretty low on the horizon. Perhaps I should begin today's round of KKP articles with something appropriately mellow.

Came across trumpeter Jun Miyake's（三宅純）debut 1983 album "June Night Love" and fell instantly for the first track "A Thoughtful Touch". Those first several bars had me thinking City Pop/J-AOR right off the bat but then Miyake's flugelhorn entered the scene and I realized that we were gonna get some classy jazz thrown into the mix as well. Miyake, of course, is great but I also wanted to find out who the fellow was driving on the saxophone but could only get as close as The Nakagawa Group for the horn section. But my compliments also go to Hiroki Inui who was the keyboardist. His work put me immediately at ease. Finally, one more shoutout to prolific chorus group EVE who, as one commenter put it, was pretty much attached to just about everyone in the recording booth in the 1980s.

Miyake, who was born in Kyoto in 1958 but raised in Kamakura, was discovered by another Japanese jazz trumpet legend, Terumasa Hino（日野皓正）, and given the recommendation to attend the Berklee College of Music which he did between 1976 and 1981. His Wikipedia article gives quite a lengthy description of achievements, but I, as someone who has a passing interest in the culture surrounding Japanese names, also have to mention from his J-Wiki entry that his maternal grandfather was a Kobe University professor emeritus by the name of Shinjiro Iokibe（五百籏頭眞治郎）, one of the longest full names in kanji that I've ever seen. 

Indeed, it's the first time in my life that I've ever heard of the family name Iokibe（五百籏頭）. According to a website which specializes in the derivation and geography of Japanese names, Iokibe is not surprisingly one of the rarest names with currently only about 30 to 40 people with it in all of Japan, mainly concentrated in the prefectures of Kyoto, Hyogo and Osaka.