Curtis Creek Band -- Foggy

 

Ah, yes. William Thomas Riker...former First Officer of the USS Enterprise-D and Enterprise-E, former Captain of the USS Titan, trombone player, great cook and apparently was once rather popular with the ladies. I believe that some folks know that I'm also an old fan of "Star Trek" although there were a few lean years in the franchise...mind you, the first season of "Strange New Worlds" and the final season of "Picard" have helped alleviate some of the pain.

Well, why bring such an overt shoutout to that other pop culture love of mine into a Japanese music blog? It goes back to a talk that I had with podcaster Rocket Brown a few weeks back where he recommended a group to me called Curtis Creek Band. As soon as I heard the name, something clicked within my memory engrams. Something that had to do with "Star Trek" and specifically, Will Riker. It didn't take me long to discover that Curtis Creek had indeed been mentioned in an episode of "The Next Generation" decades ago. It was the name of a river in Alaska which was part of Riker's holodeck program for fishing.

In a very eerie coincidence, I have also discovered via Discogs that the members of Curtis Creek Band didn't get together necessarily because of music but because they were all fellow fishing hobbyists. Were they fishing on Riker's favourite body of water? Things that make me go Hmmmm.🎣

Curtis Creek Band got together in 1979 as this fusion band centering around harmonica player Nobuo Yagi（八木のぶお）and saxophonist Toshiro Sakka（さっか利郎）. They were then joined by guitarist Toru Hirano（平野融）, drummer Hajime Hirano（平野肇）, and pianist Toshiya Shioiri（塩入俊哉）. According to Discogs, they released four albums up to 1983 with that final one being "Windy People", and from what I've found, there were two versions of "Windy People": one with the some guy holding a bouquet of flowers on a motorcycle as you can see above and another version with a woman looking over the word "white". Both versions have different tracks as well. Maybe the band wanted to go with twins.

The first version of "Windy People" has "Foggy", a laidback but funky track led strongly by Sakka that could be accompanying someone through a walk in such meteorological conditions. Composed by singer-songwriter Ryo Takayasu（高安良）, there is plenty of good groove in "Foggy" and the arrangement reminds me a bit of Billy Joel's "The Stranger". The ending finished with sounds of water lapping on shore and some foghorn sounding off in the distance; it had me taking off my headphones for a few seconds thinking that there was a storm going off outside (we actually had a huge thunderstorm about an hour earlier with hail).