Off-Course -- Wasure Yuki（忘れ雪）

 

Well, we may be done with winter but I guess that winter was not quite done with us yet...despite the fact that we are one month into spring! Indeed, we had 5 cm of snow dumped onto us yesterday but as is typically the case for Toronto, next week will see us having 22-degree days once more. But as my anime buddy has often told me, no one here changes their winter tires back to summer tires until May.

In yet another case of KKP forgetfulness, I wrote, all the way back in September 2018, about the short-lived band Zariba's（ザリバ）"Aru Hi"（或る日）which had a virtually unrecognizable vocal performance by a teenage Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）. At the time, I had just received "Tsutsumi Kyohei: Jisen Sakuhinshuu"（筒美京平自選作品集...Kyohei Tsutsumi's Personal Selection）, an amassing of the late great composer's many works for many artists of which "Aru Hi" was one. In that same article, I mentioned that I would also write about Tsutsumi's contribution for the folk-pop band Off-Course（オフ・コース）, "Wasure Yuki" (Snow For Forgetting). Well, let's leap ahead more than 2 years later...😞

Right now, perhaps a lot of relatively new and even veteran Off-Course fans may be a little boggle-eyed at the revelation that someone else had composed a song for the band when the usual assumption is that keyboardist Kazumasa Oda（小田和正）and/or guitarist Yasuhiro Suzuki（鈴木康博）would take care of the songwriting. Ah, but such was not the case for "Wasure Yuki" which was Off-Course's 6th single released in October 1974. In fact, it was the hitmaking combination of Tsutsumi and lyricist Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）that came up with the song since I gather that the band was still considered to be too green and at the record company Express/Toshiba EMI's insistence, a couple of relative vets were to come up with the next Off-Course song.

Also, according to the J-Wiki article on "Wasure Yuki", no one in Off-Course was happy with the results...either with the A-side or the B-side "Mizuirazu no Gogo"（水いらずの午後...An Afternoon Alone）, some thing that, knowing my impressions of Oda over the decades, didn't surprise me one bit. Oda doesn't sing other people's songs (even those by Tsutsumi and Matsumoto); he almost always sings his own group's creations, and with the conclusion that these weren't the songs that they had been hoping for, after the single had been put out on sale that October, Off-Course never bothered to sing them live ever. Still, I guess all involved chalked it up to experience and were good enough sports about the situation because the band would continue their recording relationship with Toshiba EMI for several more years.

But in all honesty, although I have to admit that "Wasure Yuki" doesn't sound quite like an Off-Course song, it's not a badly-done song at all. It has quite the beautiful waltz-like arrangement and the sung harmonies are lovely. Plus, the comments underneath the video have also been rather praiseworthy. Neither the A-side or B-side were placed onto an original album by the band and the single was left to lapse into haiban status, but they did eventually find their way onto a March 1998 Off-Course BEST compilation "OFF COURSE Singles".

This is my fifth article for today and usually I would stop at four but seeing my lapse in memory, I did have to make amends, and then on reading the story behind "Wasure Yuki", I just had to get this one done under the wire.