Yasuhiro Abe -- Gosenshi（五線紙）

 

Last week on the regular Yutaka Kimura Speaks segment of Urban Contemporary Fridays, No. 29 was Mariya Takeuchi's（竹内まりや）"Gosenshi" which had been created by lyricist Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）and singer-composer Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）for her 1980 album "Love Songs". It was a nice little doo-wop number matching Mariya's type of music back then.

Well, about 14 years later, Abe put out his album of covers, "Passage", in October 1994 with one of those tracks being a cover of "Gosenshi". This time, with Greg Adams arranging everything, Abe puts out his version with the backing of one smashing swing jazz orchestra. I was half-expecting an old NBC announcer to come on and say that the song was being performed at the top of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan. By the way, another song that I've covered from "Passage" is "Kuu na"（くーな）, a number that had been first performed by Masayuki Suzuki（鈴木雅之）.

Abe and songbird-songwriter EPO had apparently been on backup vocals for the Mariya original, so I gather that it was natural that the two of them would perform "Gosenshi". However, I don't think their version was officially put onto vinyl (which is too bad) but just put out there on a 1986 radio program. Coming in between the Takeuchi doo-wop original from 1980 and the all-out jazz Abe cover from 1994, this EPO-Abe performance is an amazing work that reminds me of some of the jazz vocal groups from the 1950s and 1960s such as Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Heck, I would be thrilled if the current incarnation of the Manhattan Transfer would be able to cover it someday.