Tyrone Hashimoto -- Livin' Inside My Love

First off, I hope folks in Japan are doing OK as Typhoon Faxai starts scouring the Pacific coast including the Tokyo area. I was talking with my student last night and it may be somewhat iffy whether he will be able to head into work early in the morning. Looking at the live stream cameras for the city, the rain is coming down hard but the high winds haven't quite started to invade the Kanto yet.

Secondly, I gotta give my compliments to my good friend Jerry of Come Along Radio for leading me to this fellow Tyrone Hashimoto. We were having a nice talk earlier this morning about the various City Pop artists when he mentioned his latest acquisition on vinyl, Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut album from 1978, and specifically the track "Simoon", the technopop ode to 40s and 50s tropical nightclub fare via Mos Eisley.

Jerry let me know that the vocoder-enhanced crooner in "Simoon" was singer-songwriter Shunichi Hashimoto（橋本俊一）which was the stage name for Shunichi Suzuki（鈴木俊一）from Tochigi Prefecture, according to his J-Wiki profile. He's been in the music business since 1971 and has been contributing his vocals onto records since that YMO gig and providing plenty of songs for commercials since 1982. In 1983, Hashimoto changed his nom de guerre from Shunichi to Tyrone（タイロン橋本）and has continued to release albums right up to 2018.

His second album under Tyrone Hashimoto is "Moments of Love" from 1988 and I found this track "Livin' Inside My Love" which is, for the most part, a smooth-as-silk tune that takes things wholly to the American side of urban contemporary rather than the Japanese genre of City Pop...the same direction that Junko Yagami（八神純子）was taking at around the same time. Hashimoto has that earnest delivery which reminds me of another singer that I discovered a few years earlier, Junk Fujiyama（ジャンクフジヤマ）. I think the only thing that clumps up the silk a bit is when he tries out some of those vocal acrobatics near the end and doesn't quite stick the landing. Sorry if I'm acting like the Russian judge here. Still, I want to learn more about the vocoder-less Hashimoto through "Moments of Love" along with some of his other releases over the years.

Many thanks, Jerry!

Yellow Magic Orchestra/Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra -- Simoon

Looking back to the very first album of the Yellow Magic Orchestra from 1978, I realized that the band was trying a number of different musical styles. Along with the two computer game songs that bracket the album, there was "Firecracker" and "Tong Poo" which was going for that Asian motif while "Cosmic Surfin'"was a techno tribute to The Ventures.

Then there was the third song, "Simoon". I read a number of the comments for this song on YouTube, and they remark that it sounded like something played at a 40s/50s tropical nightclub with lots of cocktails. I heartily agree. It was YMO filtering a score from an old Hollywood movie set in Africa. And yet, the actual origins behind "Simoon" came from much farther away. Let's say "Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away".

According to the liner notes for the song in the album, "YMO GO HOME"(1999), composer Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）and lyricist Chris Mosdell were inspired by the Tatooine desert featured in the original "Star Wars" where poor ol' C-3PO and R2-D2 had to trudge through before getting snatched up by the Jawas. "Simoon", according to those same notes, apparently means "heat wave".  Yep, I wouldn't mind having one of those tropical cocktails with the umbrellas right now.

In 2001, there was an NHK satellite broadcast called "The Yellow Magic Show" which included a more organic performance of "Simoon" by The Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra with YMO drummer Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）. This rendition brings the tropical flavour even more to the fore. The mysterious lyrics, originally crooned through the vocoder by Shunichi "Tyrone" Hashimoto（橋本俊一） (according to k2ymo3 the uploader of the top video), are now revealed on this video. But in the case that the video is taken down, here they are right under the paragraph:

Hot starlight
Where a blue moon dreams
On the sheik and she
Steal a night kiss
Baby's a belly dance
Mirage romancer in Casablanca
Frankincence in the
Tressles of her hair
They ride the night
On his white mare
Her perfume drifts
On the Arabian air
From the heart of the harem
He carries her off
Down to palm-breeze oasis
Behind a sand dune croons
She with her Eastern promise
And secrets in the sand
Oh, she's only a desert song

(from the liner notes of "YMO GO HOME")

Ah, if only Luke, Obi-Wan and Han had stayed at the Mos Eisley cantina a little bit longer, the band may have played this classic.