Miki Matsubara -- Juu-ni Gatsu no Paris（12月のパリ）

 

In my last article, Yosui Inoue's（井上陽水）"Merry Christmas"（メリー・クリスマス）, I mentioned about Rocket Brown's latest Xmas episode. Well, as I was listening to the music and the banter between Scott and Rocket, I came across this little treat.

The voice was instantly recognizable: Miki Matsubara（松原みき）. But the song wasn't...it was something that I had never heard so it was time to start punching in words into the Google Japan search engine and fairly quickly, I was able to glean that the song for this article is named "Juu-ni Gatsu no Paris" (December in Paris), all about some Joyeux Noel romance in the City of Lights.

Written by Masako Arikawa（有川正沙子）and composed by Casiopea（カシオペア）keyboardist Minoru Mukaiya（向谷実）, this was actually the first track on Matsubara's 8th album "Lady Bounce". It's basically the synths doing a lot of the heavy lifting but I wouldn't really categorize "Juu-ni Gatsu no Paris" as a technopop tune, but in fact, I'd say that it has that City Pop beat with some jazziness thrown in for good measure, especially when one of the keyboards decides to masquerade as a trombone.

I also gotta say that the album in general has got the backing of some pretty big studio musicians. Along with Mukaiya on the keyboards, there's also Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）on guitar, Jake H. Concepcion on saxophone, and trumpeter Shin Kazuhara（数原晋）just to name a few.