Ryuichi Sakamoto -- Dragoon

 

Over the Holidays, former "Kayo Kyoku Plus" writer and good friend JTM and I exchanged City Pop books for Christmas, and he was kind enough to give me a 2020 revised edition of "Disc Collection: Japanese City Pop". This is based upon the original "Japanese City Pop" bible (2002) which I picked up in the late 2000s at Tower Records Shinjuku. The 2020 edition has quite a few more photos and 200 additional albums on top of the 500 in the original.

An album that is a part of the new 200 is "Hi-phonics, Hi-phonics", a February 1979 compilation commemorating the 15th anniversary of a Nippon Broadcasting System radio program known at the time as "Hitachi Music Inn Hi-phonic"（日立ミュージック・イン・ハイフォニック）which first started up in 1963. The Hi-phonic didn't refer to the sound quality of the program but was actually a name of a Hitachi transistor radio. But getting back to "Hi-phonics, Hi-phonics", a number of musicians (touted as "The Hi-phonic Big 15") got into the production including Yellow Magic Orchestra's Ryuichi Sakamoto & Haruomi Hosono（坂本龍一・細野晴臣）, singer Nanako Sato（佐藤奈々子）and guitarist Kazumi Watanabe（渡辺香津美）, so my feeling is that the focus was on cool ol' City Pop.

With just six tracks, I gather that "Hi-phonics, Hi-phonics" was more of a mini-album but I won't gripe about that. Instead, I'd like to bring your attention to Track 5, "Dragoon" which is an instrumental tour-de-force composed by Sakamoto. For anyone who loves the feeling of all of those urban contemporary genres in one song, look no more. "Dragoon" has it all: elegant pop, City Pop, jazz, technopop and rock. Underneath the video on YouTube, you can see the folks who were helping out in the performance including trombonist Shigeharu Mukai (向井滋春), Sakamoto and Watanabe with their solos. It's basically a potpourri of kakkoii music. That must have been some birthday album for "Hitachi Music Inn Hi-phonic". Incidentally, drink down some "Jamaica Ginger" by Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）on the album.

Speaking of the radio program, it had its first run between 1963 and 1986 weeknights for half an hour, initially between 10 and 10:30, later going from 12 to 12:30. It had a brief comeback in 2000.