Tomoharu Taki -- Taxi Driver

from Yiannis Theologos Michellis

 

Maybe for those who have just begun their Japanese City Pop odyssey (I think it's been about six years since the whole "Plastic Love" thing blew up on YouTube), search for any titles with the word "taxi" in them regarding relevant Japanese songs, and there's a good chance that you'll hit an urban contemporary tune from the old days.

Case in point: I had never heard of Tomoharu Taki（滝ともはる）before but when I saw that title "Taxi Driver" and the cool cover of the man on his 1978 debut album "Taki Tomoharu", I figured that this would be a City Pop song. Sure enough, "Taxi Driver" is a funky driving song on the highways and byways of Tokyo which was written and composed by the Oita Prefecture-born singer-songwriter. With the bluesy saxophone in there, one could love the cab ride even more as this is playing over the speakers. 

Born Tomoharu Tamaki（玉置智治）in 1955, he had just won a gold prize in the National Amateur Folk Contest in 1977 after which he released his first single and then "Taki Tomoharu". I don't know the rest of that album, but after listening to "Taxi Driver", he certainly showed his urban and urbane chops. Taki would release three more albums and nine singles up to 1982. I don't know what happened in the intervening years, but in 2001, he opened up his own live house known as Paradise Café and even set up his own record label of the same name seven years later.