All right, I'll have to confess. I do play the lottery once a month here in Toronto through things like Lotto Max and Lotto 649 although I have a very Vulcan attitude toward the whole concept since there is a certain illogic of thinking that one could win a lottery despite the millions to one odds. Yet, in a Captain Kirk moment, people still do win the millions of dollars.
The recent commercials for Lotto 649 have had a smooth-sounding announcer enticing folks to get their numbers since as he says "Somebody will win. It could be you", or something along those lines. Well, enjoying my snark like all cynics and based on what a University of Toronto statistician once chortled, I can add "Somebody will win. It WON'T be you".
But all that preamble ramble about my lottery experiences...and no, the most that I've won is $20...is because the title of this song is "It Could Happen to You" as performed by the late jazz pianist Ryo Fukui（福居良）. This was a track from his debut album "Scenery" from July 1976 and it's a winning number (no pun intended considering that ramble) because of that expression of bounciness and joy from his performance. When I first heard Fukui's version of "It Could Happen to You", I rather felt like Snoopy when he was dancing around while Schroeder was jamming away on the piano in "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Yup, any contemporary of Vince Guaraldi will be a contemporary of mine.
My previous article was on Saburo Kitajima's（北島三郎）"Kita no Daichi"（北の大地）and that was all about the wonder of Hokkaido nature. Well, Fukui hailed from Japan's northernmost prefecture and his career was based there, frequently playing at a club in Sapporo until his untimely passing in 2016. In addition to "Scenery", he put out three more albums up to 2015 and a couple of live releases. Below is Fukui's performance of the song at that club, Slowboat.
Composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Johnny Burke first created "It Could Happen to You" in 1943 and actress/singer Dorothy Lamour first sang it in the musical comedy "And the Angels Sing" in the following year.
The Wikipedia article behind the song shows a paragraph several lines deep of other singers and bands who have covered it over the decades, so it has definitely become a beloved jazz standard. One of those artists is Miles Davis who took it on in his 1958 "Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet".
Hello, Brian. Hokkaido also has some great cuisine, too. Wouldn't mind visiting there once more someday.
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