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.
Well, welcome to February! We got reminded very sternly by Mother Nature that winter is back with a vengeance. No snow and in fact, it's very sunny out there which we didn't have a lot of during January. However, it is bitterly cold, too, with a wind chill of -18 degrees Celsius.
In the early months of the pandemic back in 2020, I wrote about the opening theme for the 2007 anime "Baccano!"（バッカーノ！）, "Gun's & Roses" by the all-female jazz band Paradise Lunch. This is a group that can really cook with the music and it fits the all-action opening credits sequence like a glove.
"Gun's & Roses" came out as a single in August 2007. I was doing the usual maintenance on the blog last night when I re-encountered the article for "Gun's & Roses", so I opted to see what else by Paradise Lunch was out there. It turns out that I did find a coupling song to that single, "Nevermind". With the nocturnal panache of Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Paradise Lunch brings together swing jazz and some 70s rock. And this time, there is a vocalist by the name of Akiyo Hoshino to lead the charge. Unfortunately, that's all I could find out about the singer.
I'd heard of this anime"Baccano!"（バッカーノ！）for years here and there but never got to see it, and I found out that it was based on a light novel. My anime buddy has largely soured on the quality of light novel adaptations into anime over the past number of years with him feeling that "Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu"（涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱...The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya） was the peak of that genre targeting high school students around the mid-2000s, so he's never opined about "Baccano!".
Well, just by coincidence, the opening credits for "Baccano!" happened to fall into my YouTube recommendations yesterday so I took a look at them, and then I read up on the 2007anime on Wikipedia and TV Tropes. From my impression, the light novel and subsequent TV series was a mix of "The Godfather" and "Highlander" with that overall sheen of one of those epic miniseries that used to be televised over a work week on the American networks during the 1970s and 1980s.
I don't think I will try to search for the entire series although I will ask my buddy about it next time I talk to him on the phone, but I gotta say that those opening credits do have that jazzy panache. The producers for "Baccano!" must have taken a page out of Yoko Kanno's（菅野よう子）"Tank!" and swung for that Big Band swing.
When I saw the title for the opening theme, "Gun's & Roses", I had automatically thought that it was the band Guns & Roses coming up with a rock tune. But as it turned out, it was the title of the song itself, performed by the all-female 9-piece jazz/rock band Paradise Lunch. I couldn't find out a whole lot about them but I recall over 15 years ago that thanks to a 2004 movie called "Swing Girls", there was a brief boom in Big Band jazz (strangely enough, I believe from this decade that it will be a century since The Jazz Age), and maybe Paradise Lunch was one result of the renewed interest; I recall seeing an all-female jazz band taking the stage on TV somewhere when I was still living in Ichikawa.
In any case, "Gun's & Roses", composed by pianist Akane Noguchi（野口茜）, is quite the frenzied ride, perhaps along the lines of some of the crazy sequences in "Baccano!" itself (the title means ruckus in Italian) that I've read about. The song weaves in and out between the various players taking on the main theme like me on a tenderloin steak and some good ol' improvisation which is one vital ingredient in the genre. Let's just imagine a Battle of the Bands between Paradise Lunch and the Seatbelts!
There might actually be a Battle of the Themes, though, in my fragile mind. Pianist Makoto Yoshimori（吉森信）was responsible for the soundtrack for "Baccano!", and he came up with "Nagai Nagai Yume no Naka no Utage ~ Theme for 'Baccano!'"(Party in the Long, Long Dream). Sounding like a beefy challenge against "Gun's & Roses", "Nagai Nagai", as it would for a show that mostly takes place during Prohibition-age America, simply reeks of speakeasies and their stench of sweat, stogie smoke, alcohol, gunpowder and occasionally the odd splash of blood. And from around the 3:00 mark, it sounds as if one speakeasy had Eliot Ness and his Untouchables raiding the place with all of the subsequent chaos of gunfire, quick escapes and thrown punches. If the rest of the soundtrack is similar to both themes, then I gather that if I do catch an episode, I will be in for a lot of action on the level of "Indiana Jones" and Brian DePalma's"The Untouchables" with Al Capone's baseball bat reprimand on one unlucky lieutenant being fairly calm in comparison.
