Swing Slow -- Swing Slow

 

Almost 7 1/2 years ago, I contributed an article on this cover of a cute 50s song that I'd never heard called "Good Morning, Mr. Echo". The song that was originally recorded in 1951 by The Jane Turzy Trio (really just Turzy with some overdubbing) sounded like the ideal theme song for a pioneering American morning news show on one of the networks in the early days of television, and this cover was performed by one of the legends of contemporary kayo and his associate, a City Pop singer-turned-technopop diva of the 1980s. Of course, I'm talking Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）...or I should say Harry Hosono Jr....and Miharu Koshi（コシミハル） respectively, and the duo was called Swing Slow.

For the "Good Morning, Mr. Echo" article, I'd mentioned that I would have to eventually get onto talking about the rest of "Swing Slow" which was released in October 1996. Well, I guess "eventually" is about the length of an adolescence or almost twice as long as a long-running TV series reaching rerun-ability status. In any case, apologies.

I'm also...finally...getting onto this since though I have looked through both English and Japanese search engines, there really isn't very much out there at all that talks about "Swing Slow" aside from the fact that it exists. I did find a fellow Blogspot blog called "Spin Easy Time" by Mr. C which did talk about the album in some detail. He posited one observation which has stuck with me: perhaps it's minimalist Shibuya-kei music. Well, let's find out. I certainly did since I used to see this album on the shelves for years at the various CD shops in Tokyo before I finally pulled the trigger and bought it at Recomints at Nakano Broadway years and years ago. The shop has since closed down.

Had no idea about what my ears were going to get into but my eyes were drawn to the cover of what looked like Hosono & Koshi's attempt at a film noir poster. It was something to see the former member of New Music pioneer Happy End and technopop pioneer Yellow Magic Orchestra in darkened profile while Koshi looked absolutely stunning as a Japanese Audrey Hepburn. I wonder whether Harry was going for a bit of Joe Bradley there.

The first song for the above video is "Western Bolero", and considering "Good Morning, Mr. Echo", I'd been expecting this to be another cover of an obscure 50s country-and-western song, but actually this was written and composed by Koshi herself with So-si Suzuki also working on the music. It's sung in French by Koshi and it seems to relate the tale of a taciturn lone-wolf gunslinger on the plain. I don't know enough about boleros to talk from that angle but it does have the languid pace of one, and though the keyboard arrangement seems to take things into the 70s, it feels like Alain Delon riding slowly off into the sunset after dispatching some bad guys on the range.

One of my favourite tracks on "Swing Slow" besides "Good Morning, Mr. Echo" is "I'm Leaving It All Up To You" which mixes in some Lounge with the Western and it has both Harry and Miharu doing another duet.

This track is indeed a cover of the 1957 original by Don Harris and Dewey Terry but I knew that I had heard it somewhere in my childhood, and it was probably from Donny & Marie Osmond. Our family used to watch their ABC variety show on Friday nights. I believe that I did say from the beginning that we were watching quite a few country-variety shows in our much younger years.

As I got deeper into "Swing Slow", I realized that I was getting further into some weird and older territory. I think one comment that I read was comparing some of the music here to the soundtrack for "Twin Peaks", one odd cult favourite from the history of American TV (and it also did quite a number on the Japanese viewing public). Listening to fun if eerie "Disappeared" by Koshi and Suzuki again, there is something beatnik, lounge-y and space-age about the whole experience of this aural film noir of six minutes and thirty-eight seconds, especially with all of the percussion, French accordion and organ. "Disappeared" probably has to be heard in a red-lit room with all sorts of libations starting with martinis. Although there are French lyrics written for this one, they are never sung (at least, not on my copy); instead I believe it's Koshi with those haunting wails. In fact, I'd say that a little over half of the tracks are instrumentals.

The lightly swinging space age weirdness continues with Koshi's "Capybara". Her music is arranged in that Latin lounge style but the beat and her French lyrics sound almost ideal as a children's song. However, she and Yoshiharu Kawaguchi portray a capybara and a caiman respectively as they play a dangerous game of fly and spider. The strange concept reminds me much of what I had to read in Eugene Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" in high school French.

"Voo Doo Surfer" is a purely Swing Slow concoction officially giving tribute in the liner notes to Timothy Leary. It can belong in that "Twin Peaks" lounge or one of the weirder Tex Avery cartoons or even on a Steven Soderbergh "Ocean's Eleven" soundtrack. The guys and gals can be twisting away in their fine clothing to this one.

Swing Slow also help in providing their own unique cover for the traditional song "Yuki ya Konkon" （雪やこんこん）, written as "Yuki-ya-konko" for this album. Not sure what the original songwriter Rentaro Taki（瀧廉太郎）would have said about this version which incorporates the musical themes of "Swing Slow" including some of that synthpop and even a bit of Mancini, but hey, I'm daddy-cool with it!

There are also a few other instrumentals left in "Swing Slow" but I'll leave those to other articles, although hopefully we won't have to wait another seven years and change. But before I finish off, I have yet to answer that question posed by Mr. C above: is "Swing Slow" a minimalist Shibuya-kei album? Well, I think it does skirt that genre to a certain extent (at least enough to include it in Labels), but considering the 1950s spacy influences here and the observation that Shibuya-kei was more about the Bacharach and French pop of the 1960s, perhaps the album is one step parallel to that genre. When I listen to this one-off by Hosono and Koshi, I imagine more along the lines of "Mad Men" sleek suits and dresses more than open shirts with ruffles and velvet blazers. Anyways, have that classic cocktail with this album!