Hiroyuki Namba -- Tropical Exposition

 

Just returned from a ramen lunch with a couple of friends earlier today. It was darn cold outside but one couldn't have a better day to down a bowl of delectable noodles, and today's bowl was tan tan men. I haven't had the spicy form of ramen in quite a few years so I was happy to partake in it.

As well, one couldn't have asked for a more meteorologically different song when considering my hometown than this one by singer and sci-fi author Hiroyuki Namba（難波弘之）. "Tropical Exposition" is a track on his 1983 mini-album "Who Done It?" and as stated on Hip Tank Records, adjectives like "chillout" and "ambient" are listed for "Tropical Exposition". It's quite the heady and spacy musical experience with Namba echoing away over a reggae rhythm and snappy percussion. Enjoy that rum punch in the hammock while listening to this one in the 30+-degree temperatures Celsius.

Kyoko Endo -- Hitori Narcissist（ひとり・ナルシス）

 

Singer-songwriter Kyoko Endo（遠藤響子）is someone that I haven't covered in well over a year so I had been thinking of covering her "Douka, Kokoro Tojinai de"（どうか、心閉じないで）from her 1993 album "Koibito ni Naritai"（恋人になりたい...I Want to be Your Lover）, quite the City Pop tune of that final decade in the 20th century. However, I found out to my surprise that, lo and behold, I had already written about it back in late 2022.

Well, not willing to quite let Endo go, I did some more searching about. By the end, I discovered her 3rd single "Hitori Narcissist" (Narcissist of One) which was released in October 1982, and according to her J-Wiki file, it was from this release that her full title of singer and songwriter began as compared to her first two singles including her debut "Kokuhaku Telephone"（告白テレフォン）which had Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）as the composer. 

Endo took care of both words and music with this intriguing "Hitori Narcissist" which was arranged by keyboardist and sci-fi author Hiroyuki Namba（難波弘之）. Beginning with this snarl of AOR guitar playing and progressing into some light funk and pop, the song even hits upon the old-fashioned pop sounds of the 50s and 60s. Lyrically, there is perhaps some resemblance to Mariya Takeuchi's（竹内まりや） "Plastic Love" as a woman does the Tokyo party circuit and puts on the happy face although she is feeling anything but happy. She just has to be seen to be seen.

Mari Kaneko & Bux Bunny -- Serenade（セレナーデ）

 

It's already Saturday April 29th in Japan so that means that the annual Golden Week holidays have begun there. Apparently all of the COVID measures have been lifted so the hordes of tourists will be engorging every source of transportation around the country. My friend will be headed to Japan himself but he's making sure that he will be avoiding Golden Week.

Anyways, let's begin Urban Contemporary Friday here on KKP with some 70s City Pop. Just by coincidence, it's almost been a year since I put up a song by Mari Kaneko & Bux Bunny（金子マリ & バックス・バニー）. The band has been categorized as a rock group and indeed Kaneko has been called the Janis Joplin of Shimo-Kitazawa (a cool bohemian neighbourhood in Tokyo), but I think that this particular song from their 1978 album "Shoot the moon" is something quite different altogether.

"Serenade" is a mostly laidback, sip-the-whiskey, sunset sort of City Pop tune of the 1970s with that characteristic haze effect on the synths, some bluesiness and comforting vocals by Kaneko. It was written by the late gospel singer Yuka Kamebuchi（亀渕友香）with melody by keyboardist and sci-fi writer Hiroyuki Namba（難波弘之）, who had also been one of the other founding members for Bux Bunny. I would love to know who was on the trumpet.

Atlas -- Simpatia

Matt K. dropped me a line a few days ago about this very fascinating album titled "Breeze" by the group Atlas. It was released back in 1987, and Atlas just happened to consist of keyboardist Hiroyuki Namba（難波弘之）, guitarist Eiji Kawamura（川村栄二）and keyboardist Toshiro Imaizumi（今泉敏郎）. All three of them gained their fame as members of Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）backing band, and then they decided to create a unit of their own, although Atlas doesn't get mentioned in Namba's J-Wiki article for some reason.

Listening to Matt's recommended track from "Breeze", "Simpatia" is indeed a dreamy tropical mood maker of a number, complete with waves crashing into the shore. It's all-so-very comfortable with the Latin beat and the soft tones of the female vocalist, and on a couple of sites, this track and the album itself have been referred to as being Balearic in arrangement. I had to actually look up what Balearic was all about, and according to Wikipedia, it is "...an eclectic blend of DJ-led dance music that emerged in the mid-1980s..." and was "...named for its popularity among European nightclub and beach rave patrons on the Balearic island of Ibiza...", a Spanish island. One description of the song at one of the sites basically called "Simpatia" a love letter of sorts from Tokyo to Ibiza itself.

If memory serves, I did hear of this genre before when I was reading about a couple of Kazuhiro Nishimatsu's（西松一博）albums: "Aragon" and "Bouekifu Monogatari"（貿易風物語）. I've got very little knowledge about Balearic but listening to the selections in the above video for Balearic House, I'm not quite sure whether Atlas' "Simpatia" actually does fall into this genre of dance music. I can clearly hear synths in the song but I don't think that it really pushes "Simpatia" into dance music territory. If anything, it's the opposite; listeners would probably want to walk over to a lounge chair or a hammock and sip on a pineapple cocktail instead. Maybe Balearic AOR is more the thing here.

Yet, when I hear the song, I do think of futuristic resorts for some reason. Considering that Namba has also been a sci-fi writer, maybe a smile would come to his face if he ever read this.

Hiroyuki Namba -- Party Tonight

Kinda looks like my city got transplanted onto Utopia Planitia on Mars, doesn't it? Not sure how all this came about but I didn't let the photographic opportunity go to waste.

Anyways, just a few days after writing about musician, singer-songwriter and SF novelist Hiroyuki Namba（難波弘之）for the first time, I did feel rather compelled to come back to him quickly since I came across a couple of tracks from his 1981 album "Party Tonight". I don't have the album...yet, but still would like to introduce these two.

The first is the title track itself with the full title of "Party Tonight ~ Chikyuu wo Tooku Hanarete"（パーティ・トゥナイト (地球を遠く離れて...Get Far Away from the Earth)）. Composed by Namba and written by Yukari Udo（有働ゆかり）, I recognized the song immediately since it's also included on one of the "Light Mellow" CDs in my possession. It sounds like a pretty calming down-to-earth City Pop number but Udo's lyrics paint a cosmic tale of someone inviting that significant other for what seems like a romantic rendezvous on the Red Planet. Before I took a look at the lyrics, I had already my ears exposed to the then-odd lyric involving Phobos and Deimos, the two moons orbiting Mars.

However, the piece de resistance for me on this album so far is "Silver-Gray no Machi" (シルバーグレイの街...City of Silver and Gray) which is even more of a 1981 party-down-Tokyo-town treat than the title track, and for those bass addicts, you've come to the right place. I couldn't find out for sure who created this ideal contribution to a Van Paugam City Pop party but according to the Raregroove shop, Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）and Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）also had their fingerprints on the song, and certainly that would be Yoshida's voice supporting Namba's vocals. The overall arrangement sounds like something from the late Rod Temperton's bag of tricks, and "Silver-Gray no Machi" could have adorned the ears of any city slicker heading to Shinjuku or Roppongi way back when while wearing a shiny silver-gray suit with skinny tie.

Tatsuro Yamashita/Hiroyuki Namba -- Natsu e no Tobira（夏への扉）

Jerry from Come Along Radio passed along some rather important information to me in regards to City Pop a few hours earlier. Today is the 39th anniversary of the release of Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）classic album "Ride On Time". Yep, on this day in 1980, when I was in my mid-teens and Ronald Reagan was in the campaign to become president of the United States, Yamashita came out with "Ride On Time" that became his first No. 1 album. And of course, years later, it has become a hit with a new generation of fans in and outside of Japan.

I kinda missed my opportunity for the grand presentation of "Ride on Time" since I had already put up my article for the album back on New Year's Eve 2015. However, there are a few songs that I didn't cover then, so this gives me a chance to at least cover one here.

And this one here is "Natsu e no Tobira" (The Door Into Summer), another wonderfully smooth and mellow track from the album under the dynamic duo of Yamashita as composer along with Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）as lyricist. It goes down as well as one of my favourite cocktails, the Brown Cow and has that lovely flugelhorn solo by Kenji Nakazawa（中沢健二）. All very summery...except that "Natsu e no Tobira" wasn't really titled for the season.

It was actually titled after a Robert Heinlein science-fiction hardcover novel from 1957, "The Door Into Summer" about an engineer and inventor, Daniel Boone Davis, who got cheated out of his fortune and decides to use time travel and his genius to get justice...and the girl. The one thing that got my curiosity in the lyrics was Yoshida's usage of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and so I had once assumed that "Natsu e no Tobira" had something to do with Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". However, the fact is that Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was the childhood nickname for Virginia Heinlein, the author's third wife, and it turns out that the love interest in "The Door Into Summer" is named Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke. 

At the end of the song, there's even a sound indicating some sort of sci-fi ship taking off. It isn't exactly the TARDIS but I can imagine that it's Daniel's contraption in action.

So what was the connection between Tats and Robert Heinlein? Well, according to the liner notes for the 2002 re-release of "Ride On Time", it turns out that in the previous year of 1979, "Natsu e no Tobira" had originally been created by Yamashita and Yoshida for keyboardist and composer Hiroyuki Namba's（難波弘之）album "Sense of Wonder" which would also become the name of his own group in the 1980s. Namba, who is also a science-fiction novelist as well as a big fan of the genre (not mentioned in the English Wikipedia article for him), recorded "Sense of Wonder" with the theme of sci-fi for each of the tracks including the original "Natsu e no Tobira" at 20:20 in the above video for the whole album. Nice original and the instrumental bridge is filled with Namba's own doodlings on the keyboard instead of the flugelhorn on the Yamashita cover.

In any case, Happy 39th Birthday for "Ride On Time" and looking forward to the 40th next year! Plus, Namba is a name that I've been seeing for years in "Japanese City Pop" and when making up the articles for the blog, although I have to admit that this is the first article in KKP's history to include him. I will have to see what else is out there by him.

P.S. Also have a look at Jerry's own article on the album itself.

Takako Mamiya -- Love Trip

A mystery for me...and for anyone who reads this. I came across this album, "Love Trip" (1982) through the auspices of "Japanese City Pop". Furthermore, I found just one song by Takako Mamiya （間宮貴子）on YouTube, and I'm not even sure if it's been uploaded in its entirety. "Mayonaka no Joke"(真夜中のジョーク...Midnight Joke) is a pretty decent City Pop tune. But despite looking throughout the Net, I haven't been able to find any more information about this singer. Would like to track it down someday, but I've got a feeling that this could be one of the rarest of the rare. (April 15, 2017: Obviously since my original comments, things have improved on this front...as long as the powers-that-be don't take it down. And I hope they don't. I still consider the album a very rare find.)

"Mayonaka no Joke" was written by lyricist Ichiko Takehana（竹花いち子）and composed by Hiroyuki Nanba（難波弘之）. Takehana apparently has her own foodie blog. As for the title track, "Love Trip" is one smooth tonic that brings to mind folks like Al Jarreau and Gino Vannelli in the arrangement. Etsuko Kisugi（来生えつこ）and Kazuo Shiina（椎名和夫）were responsible for words and music respectively, and as with the album as a whole, "Love Trip" the song has all of the tropes that has made City Pop as delectable as it has for many a new fan, including what I call the Evian spring water keyboard riff. This is a must-get for any convert to the cause.