STOMPi and Swing Labo -- Bi-ki-di-ki-da, Bi-ki-di-ki-doo（ビキディキダー・ビキディキドゥー）

 

Back in elementary school, we did get some music experience on a weekly basis, and that was through the soprano recorder. Yup, I had to learn that and then sometime down the line, I was transferred to something like the alto or tenor recorder. It made for some good preparation to get onto the clarinet in junior high school, which makes me wonder why I even bothered to opt for the French horn first. I guess that I wanted to try something brassy but I only ended up fogging up my glasses trying to blow into the darn thing and becoming a grand candidate for the "Kick Me" sticker.

Taking things back to a happier place, though, when I was first working in Japan, I discovered that recorders weren't quite the thing among children. Of course, there was the piano but then I also found out that elementary school kids also played something called the pianica which was half-keyboard and half-woodwind. Actually, the general term for this instrument is the melodica; pianica is the trade name given by Yamaha. Listening to it, I guess in a way that it is the woodwind analog to the accordion because of a similarity in sound. Initially, it was rather weird watching this French-sounding music being emitted through blowing into a tube instead of pushing air through a bellows but the longer I stayed in Japan, it became a common enough sight.

Well, all that preamble was brought to you to introduce the congenial swing jazz of STOMPi and Swing Labo which has those pianica players in place. Consisting of vocalist/ukelele player STOMPi, percussionist/pianica player Pianica Maeda（ピアニカ前田）, guitarist Masayuki Ishii（石井マサユキ）and Koichi Shimizu（清水光一）on wood bass, they released one self-titled album in September 2017, and one of the tracks is "Bi-ki-di-ki-da, Bi-ki-di-ki-doo". That title strikes me as the type of title that I would hear for an old 1920s jazz number, and the song does indeed have that happy swinging vibe. I read in one of those jazz tomes long ago that bands of those days would regularly travel to and fro among the American cities to do their gigs, and "Bi-ki-di-ki-da, Bi-ki-di-ki-doo" sounds like the type of tune that would accompany that road trip. For this particular number, trumpeter Akira Tanidono（谷殿明良）joins in as a guest player.

I can see that there are a few more YouTube videos featuring STOMPi and Swing Labo but I haven't read of any further albums or singles released by this unique group. Hopefully, they're still out there somewhere.