Kazuhiko Kato/Akiko Yano -- New York Confidential（ニューヨーク・コンフィデンシャル）

 

For the final song for this edition of Urban Contemporary Fridays on "Kayo Kyoku Plus", I decided to leaf through the pages of the original "Japanese City Pop" if I could find something that I hadn't discovered in my many browsings of YouTube.

Well, it wasn't too too difficult. At the bottom of Page 103, there was singer-songwriter Kazuhiko Kato's（加藤和彦）September 1983 album "Ano Koro, Marie Laurencin"（あの頃、マリー・ローランサン...At That Time, Marie Laurencin）. Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) was a French painter known as a member of the Parisian avant-garde back in the day. 

But according to Kato himself, his aim with this particular album was to provide some elegant music for all of the business workers in Tokyo who had forgotten about the worth of music once they got home to their tiny cubicles of apartments. Very sporting of the fellow to give some metropolitan BGM, but of course, with Kato this wouldn't be merely Muzak. Incidentally, all of the tracks on "Marie Laurencin" were composed by Kato, written by Kazumi Yasui（安井かずみ）and arranged by Kato and Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）.

Track 3 is one fine example. "New York Confidential" is a pretty lush creation that actually sounds more like the night life of the Big Apple rather than the urban scene in Tokyo, although perhaps that was what those Japanese junior executives were searching for...New York music for the Tokyo metropolitan moderns with that City Pop, jazz and Fashion Music. It sounds like having that peaceful and romantic candlelight dinner in any of the penthouses of Manhattan, above the madding crowds and bustling trains.

There were a number of bigwig musicians helping out in the recording of the album, including Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）who was playing the piano on "New York Confidential". Apparently, Yano was so moved during the recording of the song that she wept and so was afraid that she had ruined the take. But it was kept in. In fact, many years later in 1995, she covered the song herself in a much quieter and more introspective style for her album "Piano Nightly".