Kazumi Watanabe -- Sonic Boom

 

If I'm not mistaken, this is a photo midway between the tony neighbourhood of Azabu-Juban and Roppongi, and I'm looking up the slope heading towards Roppongi Hills with the massive Mori Building in the background. My old Sanwa Bank branch was at the bottom of the hill. Now, I lived all the way out east in Ichikawa City, Chiba Prefecture but when I joined up with the English-language conversation school, NOVA, the powers-that-be decided that if I had any financial matters to discuss in English, I had to go to the Azabu-Juban branch since there was at least one staffer who could speak English there. Not that I minded too much since the area was a pleasant one to walk through.

Well, it's time to bring the focus of the usual Friday fusion onto guitarist Kazumi Watanabe（渡辺香津美）and his 1979 album "Kylyn". Both Watanabe and Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）co-produced this album and it has a goodly amount of the big-wig studio musicians helping out including Sakamoto, fellow keyboardist and singer Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）.

On "Kylyn", I'd like to show off the mesmerizing "Sonic Boom" which is Track 2. Sakamoto is on the acoustic piano, Rei Ohara（小原礼）is on bass, Mikio Masuda（益田幹夫）is on Fender Rhodes, the late "Ponta" Murakami（村上秀一）handles the drums, and Toshiyuki Honda（本多俊之）is on the alto sax while Yasuaki Shimizu（清水靖晃）takes care of business on the tenor sax among other highlights in the studio. For the most part, "Sonic Boom" is more of the prelude to the atmospheric event before things do get more explosive near the end; there's some give and take at the beginning between some spaciness and down-on-the-ground funkiness before the funk takes over thanks to Watanabe. It's quite the jam session and you might say that everyone in the recording booth is "KYLYN" it here.