Ossan -- Kayoubi（火曜日）

 

Well, I did say that I would cover one of their songs in the next few days. I guess then that today is one of those days.

Last night, I was writing up former SMAP member Shingo Katori's（香取慎吾）"Kon'ya Saikou ne"（今夜最高ね）, a mix of urban contemporary and jazz that has been having the lad embracing his inner Michael Bublé, so to speak. When I was checking out the songwriting credits, the writer and composer was a fellow named Sohsaku Ohtake（大竹創作）who has been the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist for a band known as Ossan（乙三....Old Geezers）. I then listened to a couple of their own tunes and found them pretty snazzy and/or jazzy. One is a traditional Christmas tune so I won't be covering that one for a few months yet, but the other one is going to be taken care of right now.

"Kayoubi" (Tuesday) is the title track from Ossan's 2nd mini-album as a major act which came out in December 2006 (each track represents a day of the week). I'm such a sucker for some rousing jazz from a tight brass section, and well, here we are. "Kayoubi" was also written and composed and sung by Ohtake, and his voice reminds me of that of Kazutoshi Sakurai（桜井和寿）from Mr. Children (just imagine him fronting a jazz band). Listening to the song for a few times now, I get vibes from Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Ego-Wrappin' and Ringo Shiina（椎名林檎）in her jazz mode.

Great song, depressing family video...and it was uploaded onto YouTube all the way back in the year 2007! But focusing on the song itself, I think that this would have made a theme song for a gritty detective drama in the roughest part of Osaka. All of the instruments are on hi-octane. 

The J-Wiki article for Ossan admits that the origins of the band are a bit murky but apparently they all got together in 2003 at a time when there were a number of brass-inclusive groups. How Ohtake and company came up with the name Ossan is also somewhat mysterious but one theory is that the guys figured that they would start to be called old geezers soon enough and so in that case, they may as well blunt the effect by calling themselves ossan first. In my estimation, although we will all probably be grabbing for the Metamucil and Ben Gay in the future, these guys still cook!