Looks like Kayo Grace has some terrifyingly good skill in making sand castles. Maybe architecture will be her career if and when she decides to leave the aidoru business. Anyways, with the arrival of the annual Canadian National Exhibition here in Toronto, and the temperatures starting to cool off in the morning and night, I gather that the summer is beginning to make its way out of here. When I went outside today, it was only feeling like 16 degrees Celsius. Quite refreshing.
So, for those in my neck of the woods, enjoy your summer as much as you can in the remaining month. Meanwhile, I can introduce this rather rare 1980s tune by Tokyo-born actor Kazuma Mori（森一馬）. Nope, I've never heard of him either but he's had a long career since 1983 on stage and screen according to his J-Wiki profile.
Of course, being seen as an up-and-comer in the geinokai back then meant that eventually the entertainer (no matter in what area) had to cut a record, talent be damned! Therefore, Mori recorded two singles, only one of which got to get onto the store shelves (although he also released three albums); all of his audio output came out in 1984. That one single was "Natsu wo Oikakerou!" (Chase the Summer!) which was released in July with Ryo Shoji（東海林良）handling lyrics while Takayuki Baba（馬場孝幸）and Kazuo Otani（大谷和夫）took care of the melody and arrangement respectively. It was the typical upbeat summer pop tune with some of that rock-n'-roll regarding the usual hijinks on the beach which sounded like something that one or two of the Tanokin Trio would have tackled in those 1980s.
There's no explanation why Mori's mystery single wasn't released officially (maybe Mori got into some of his own real hijinks), but it apparently has seen the light of day via his debut album. The single is "Midnight Train" and the debut album is "Shoshin"（初心...Naivete）.
Love the entry! So, recently, I was browsing through Bandcamp and I came across the Japan Imports page. Like the name says, they import vinyl from Japan with no digital downloads. Anyway, one of their future releases is an album from a singer named Reiko Ike that came out in 1971. What caught my attention was the cover...which wow! But that got me curious and I found she has a Wikipedia page in English and I see she was an actress who performed in a lot pink films. But she did sing as well. I came to your blog to see if you had written on her before but I didn't see an entry. Would be interesting to read your thoughts on her and her music.
ReplyDeleteHello there. I'll have to take a look myself. The name sounded familiar for quite a while. At first, I thought that she'd appeared on the Japanese TV program "Playgirl" but that wasn't the case, so I'm assuming that when I was looking up some of the videos for Meiko Kaji, Ike showed up on the recommendations list. Anyways, let me take a look at some of her music.
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