Ryuichi Sakamoto -- Broadway Boogie Woogie

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Last night, NHK's "Uta Con"（うたコン）did feature a short tribute to the great composer and arranger Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）who had passed away almost three months ago. There was some footage of his YMO days with Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）and Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）but maybe even 40-year-old technopop was a bit too far out of the show's range on the Shibuya stage to have performed, and admittedly, there are probably some who believe that only the original band could do justice to "Rydeen". Still, it was good to listen to the wistful Christmas mainstay in Japan, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" and Kiyoshi Maekawa's（前川清）"Yuki Ressha" (雪列車) from 1982, the Mood Kayo singer's debut single as a soloist that was composed by The Professor.

I was looking for something that I could put up by Sakamoto but it's a bit more difficult now since I've already added a lot of his hits with YMO and beyond over the past dozen years of KKP. But I did find a song that probably would have been a little too avant-garde for "Uta Con" but it's perfectly fine here because I do like the cool and wacky. "Broadway Boogie Woogie" hails from his 6th studio album "Mirai Ha Yaro"（未来派野郎...Futurista） which was released in April 1986 and also includes "Ballet Mecanique".

The title "Broadway Boogie Woogie" originated from the 1943 Piet Mondrian painting of the same name that you see as the thumbnail at the top. Mondrian had been inspired by the grid pattern of the Manhattan streets and the genre of boogie-woogie. In turn, Sakamoto must have been inspired by the painting and came up with this fun and cacophonous techno-boogie to get those Zoot suit guys and flowery-dressed dolls onto the dance floor; according to the J-Wiki article on the album, Sakamoto's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" is a blues-infused rock-n'-roll number.

Another interesting thing about the song is that along with Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）and Bernard Fowler (who provided vocals for "Ballet Mecanique") singing out Peter Barakan's lyrics, Sakamoto got deep into the sampling by hand-picking out certain sentences from "Blade Runner" for a repeated conversation piece. With saxophonist Maceo Parker (who worked with James Brown, Parliament Funkadelic and Prince) providing his input, "Broadway Boogie Woogie" could be the hit song for a Decopunk New York City. Techno jazz was a small thing in Japanese music with folks like Kazuhiro Nishimatsu（西松一博）but this particular song by The Professor is maybe the first example that I've come across which actually could have people cutting up a rug.