I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
Jazz and City Pop singer Kimiko Kasai（笠井紀美子）and legend Herbie Hancock have worked together before, and one example that we have here on the blog is "I Thought It Was You" from 1979.
Another comes from Kasai's 1978 album"Round and Round". Titled "Chameleon", this is Kasai's sung cover of the original song of the same name that originated as Hancock's jazz fusion instrumental standard on his 1973 album"Head Hunters". To give credit where further credit is due, Hancock had created it with Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson and Harvey Mason. For the Kasai cover, Norman Landsberg provided the English lyrics for her to apply some sultry vocalese about a love 'em-and-leave 'em cad. The song is over seven minutes long but that doesn't compare to the original percolating version by Hancock.
For a lot of us growing up in the 1980s, the golden age of music videos, when the name Herbie Hancock is mentioned, we will all think of "Rockit", the huge techno-funky hit from 1983. As well, that video with the mannequins and the strutting pants is a one-of-a-kind although seeing the Grammy performance is no longer quite as amazing as I remembered it.
(Sorry but the Kasai cover has been taken down but here is an excerpt.)
Well, last night, commenter Gen Kanai was kind enough to send me a message giving a tip on a song on chanteuse Kimiko Kasai's（笠井紀美子）1979 album"Butterfly", her collaboration with Hancock. Supposedly, according to an article on the website "Who Sampled", a number of songs on that particular release have been sampled by various hip-hop artists over the years.
One of the tracks is "I Thought It Was You", a 7-minute-plus number that is a cover of Hancock's original from his 1978 jazz-funk fest "Sunlight". The Kasai cover, of course, has her sweet and lovely voice compared to Hancock's vocoder vocals in the original. To be honest, and I'm going with Gen on this, I prefer Kasai's sweet-&-lovely. Still, Hancock's vocoder still makes a guest appearance during a give-and-take with Kasai's scatting.
It's quite the jam as "I Thought It Was You" morphs from a smooth fusion love song into a fun and funky festival and back again. According to Chris Read who wrote the article on "Who Sampled", copies of the LP are hard to track down but I did find a low-priced CD reissue of "Butterfly" up at CD Japan for a thousand yen.
Years after first hearing "Rockit" but of course years before being told about "I Thought It Was You", when I was still living in Japan, I realized how much the Japanese just loved the genre of AOR to death on both sides of the Pacific. I even ended up buying a few AOR compilations myself, and on one of them was a track by Hancock called "Paradise" which was originally on his 1982 album"Lite Me Up", a year before "Rockit", and is about as different in tone from that 1983 hit. Never would have thought the fellow as an light-and-mellow crooner but there we are. Of course, the songwriting team behind "Paradise" consisted of the masters of the genre, David Foster, Bill Champlin and Jay Graydon along with Hancock.
