The last time I wrote about the late singer-songwriter Chika Ueda（上田知華）was back at the end of last year through her 1984 album "Classiest" which took her through the liberating gamut of City Pop, AOR and pop.
Well, let's get back to her early days when she was performing with her quintet group, Chika Ueda + Karyobin (Ueda on piano with two violinists, one cellist and one viola player) in the late 1970s going into the early 1980s. I've been treating them as one of the quintessential examples of Fashion Music, my own answer to my feelings of this brand of Japanese music as a form J-Baroque Pop.
Ueda's 5th and penultimate album under this Fashion Music grouping was "Miss Heart" from December 1981, and the opening track was "Avenue". Considering that I've read that Ueda lived in New York City for about a decade between 1996 and 2006, "Avenue" may have been a prediction of her future residence. Written and composed by the singer, it just sounds like the soundtrack to a typically busy day of Ueda rushing about in Manhattan as she heads to some class at Columbia University. The strings reflect the typical hustle and bustle of life in the Big Apple while Ueda's voice lifts all of us listeners into an area where we can afford to stop and smell the roses and freshly-roasted coffee. If every Monday morning commuting to the office could be just like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to provide any comments (pro or con). Just be civil about it.