Ai Kanzaki -- Russia Koucha wa Ikaga?（ロシア紅茶はいかが？）

 

Not sure what Russian tea is like, but I've been to a restaurant serving Russian dishes in Shinjuku, just above the JR station in fact. Unfortunately, since this was many years ago, I don't quite remember all of the dishes that I had but one was definitely the regional borscht. I was a bit nervous about having my first spoonful of the red beet soup, but I didn't have anything to worry about; it was delicious.

I don't quite recall whether the wait staff even asked the question "Russia koucha wa ikaga?" (How About Some Russian Tea?), but that is the title that I have for you as part of the usual Friday batch of urban contemporary stuff from Japan. "Russia Koucha wa Ikaga?" was a track from Ai Kanzaki's（神崎愛）1980 debut album "Today".

Kanzaki is an actress who is also a soprano singer and a trained flautist, and I think that's indeed her performing on the flute for "Russia Koucha wa Ikaga?", a slick and refined City Pop tune although I don't know whether the entire album is like that. I do like it for that bit of samba in there and that rumbling piano with the City Pop chords while Kanzaki sounds quite flirtatious in her vocals. Keisuke Yamakawa（山川啓介）provided the lyrics while Yasuo Higuchi（樋口康雄）came up with the melody.

The Tokyo-born Kanzaki was practicing piano and vocals from a young age, until she also started the flute in junior high school. When she reached university, she began studying flautist Masao Yoshida（吉田雅夫）and then French flautist Marcel Moyse in Switzerland. According to "Oricon News" via her J-Wiki profile, master thespian Tatsuya Nakadai（仲代達矢）scouted her so she then studied acting along with the flute.

Although after her debut album, it would be another five years before her next release, the November 1985 "Ai no Flute"（愛のフルート...Ai's Flute or The Flute of Love）, Kanzaki would begin regularly releasing albums from that point up to 1998. Her acting had begun even earlier in 1977 and her roles would continue up to 2002. One last point of trivia from J-Wiki is that in 1994, robbers stole her beloved flute worth about $30,000 at the time from her car parked in the underground garage of the Pacific Hotel in Tokyo.