frasco -- Polaroid

 

Ahhh...that series of Polaroid commercials with Mariette Hartley and the late James Garner. The chemistry was said to have been so good between those two thespians that viewers thought that they were actually married. Incidentally, I never owned one of those foldable Polaroid cameras although I did have a relatively cheapo camera to take with me to Japan in 1981. It was always the thing to take the roll of film to have it developed at a place like Japan Camera (which was once a very popular film developing and camera store in Canada) and wait a few days before the photos were ready. Ancient technology, indeed.

Well, lo and behold, I've found this song "Polaroid" by the pop and Shibuya-kei band frasco from their November 1997 album "Missing Angel". I've highlighted this band a couple of times before with their mellow music through "Honno Sukoshi no Ai ga Areba"（ほんの少しの愛があれば）and "Kaze ni Notte ~breeze~" （風に乗って）, but they're not to be mistaken for another band, Frasco (with a capital F and a 2015 in Labels) that got their start in the mid-2010s and have one song on the blog, "Viewtiful".

Having listened to "Polaroid" a few times now, I'm not quite sure whether the song is really Shibuya-kei but it does have that summer jazz and AOR feeling thanks to the guitars and the keyboards that take on some of that Steely Dan horn sensation. According to JASRAC, lyrics were provided by Mika Morioka（森岡みか）and the music was by frasco drummer Makio Tada（多田牧男）. Of course, I have to remind folks that frasco also had the late guitarist Hiroshi Narumi（鳴海寛）of Tohoku Shinkansen fame.

Emi Shirasaya -- Kimi no Soba ni（君のそばに）/Mayonaka no Pride（真夜中のプライド）

 

Happy Saturday! Not too bad out there, weather-wise. It may be chilly but the sun is out and the room doesn't feel all that stuffy.

We're starting off with another singer-songwriter that I hadn't heard about but it's someone whose voice I do like. Emi Shirasaya（白鞘慧海）was born in Hiroshima Prefecture but raised in Ehime Prefecture. She began her music career while attending Waseda University in Tokyo, and she debuted under the stage name of Chiemi（千恵美）in 1995 with four singles and one album up to early 1997. But making a switch to another record company, she returned to her original name albeit written in hiragana（しらさやえみ）.

Then in July 1997, she released two singles on the same day, one of which was "Kimi no Soba ni" (By Your Side), a heart-on-your-sleeve love ballad with that touch of old-fashioned class in there. Not only that, but "Kimi no Soba ni" has some major veterans helping out such as Masamichi Sugi（杉真理）on the melody with Katsuhisa Hattori（服部克久）arranging everything as if the song had been made for an old Hollywood movie soundtrack. The lyricist is written down as MACO but touching the link for this person beside the title on Shirasaya's J-Wiki article took me to one Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）!

I also love Shirasaya's resonant vocals on "Kimi no Soba ni" as well as on the coupling song "Mayonaka no Pride" (Midnight Pride). This time with the singer handling the lyrics and Minoru Komorita（小森田実）providing the music and the arrangement, this is some fine light soul which was used as an ending theme for the 1994-2004 NHK-BS program "Mayonaka no Oukoku"（真夜中の王国...Midnight Kingdom） aimed at the young folks, probably in their late teens and twenties considering the lateness of the broadcast starting from at least 11:15 pm.

Shirasaya went over for several months in 2001 to New York City to perform in various venues after which she started her own label and self-produced a new album in 2002. She then converted to Christianity, working as a staffer at a church before becoming a pastor. In 2014, she restarted her music career and is also currently a gospel singer and a voice trainer.

For the person who has been asking about "The Lost Akiba Tape"

 

Dear Mr. Cuevas:

I did receive your second message through the contact form along with the other comments over the past few weeks. My first response to you was on March 11th under your first comment at the article for "Oricon Top 10 Singles for September 1989", and my second comment was on March 13th for which I referred you to that same article for my response.

As for your fear that your comments were construed to be spam, no worries about that. However, I can also reassure you that this will be my final response on the matter. Can you I ask you to acknowledge that you did read this article and my response on the other article?

EPO -- Umizoi no Aki（海沿いの秋）

 

Nope, not exactly autumn out there and I think that there would be a lot of folks who would go ballistic on me for even mentioning that season while we're still struggling to get into a warmer spring. Have faith, folks! It will get warmer...by May eventually.

Still, it's been a long while since I've put up an EPO tune and as usual, this particular track from her 1984 album "HI・TOUCH-HI・TECH" is her usual EPO-tastic fare. "Umizoi no Aki" (Seaside Autumn) was written and composed by the singer-songwriter and it's her prototypical light and bouncy music grafted with some of that 1950s or 1960s pop flavour about that ocean romance. Although EPO was fully behind the creation, there's something about that keyboard work that reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's（佐藤博）work and I think that might be City Pop crooner Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）helping out with the background vocals.

Interesting thing...my feeling was that this would be a different autumn-themed tune in that it looks like there would be an unusually happy romantic ending for the season. But then I heard EPO talking her way to the end with the final word being "Sayonara!", and I went Ah! The fall claims another victim in the hunt for lasting love.

Yoshitaka Mihara -- Summer Sunset

 

I've always loved this sunset photo taken outside of the former site of the final English school that I'd worked at in Tokyo. The building housed an insurance company among other corporations but in the basement, they had daily bento counters set up which garnered a lot of attention from hungry corporate warriors including a teacher like myself. I guess that I was a frequent purchaser since all of the old ladies there smiled and greeted me warmly. For good karaage, I'll walk kilometres and gain kilograms.

Yoshitaka Mihara（三原善隆）is a Hokkaido-born keyboardist specializing in the electone. Graduating from the Yamaha Music Academy with a degree in that instrument, he's also worked at the Yamaha Music Foundation before making his debut as a performer in 1991. In April 1993, he came up with his first album "Night Rider" which garnered Mihara a lot of praise among the music community.

Other musicians such as pianist Hiroko Kokubu（国府弘子）and trombonist Eiji Arai（新井英治）have helped out in Mihara's albums, and I think both have their prints, so to speak, in this track on "Night Rider", "Summer Sunset". This may have been a 1993 creation but there's something about this particular song that takes me back several more years into the late 1970s at least. "Summer Sunset" has some dreamy passages but also some somewhat more uptempo areas which makes me wonder whether the song should have been re-titled into "Summer Day in a Life", but I have absolutely no complaints about this track and I ought to give the title track a listen as well. At the same time, I have to give my compliments to that wonderful photo of a bridge on the front cover.

Mihara has also come up with a number of songs that have been used for commercials and opening themes for television shows. By the way, the above is a video of the Yamaha Electone Festival in Singapore as put up by the Yamaha Music School there.

Yusuke Kuwahara -- Nightwalker/Midnight Fox -- (Misty) Tonight（トゥナイト）

 

Though I remember mostly its sequel show, "Tonight II", the late-night talk-variety programme on TV Asahi, I also have Chikaco Sawada's（沢田知可子）"Aitai"（会いたい）in my head as one of the many ending themes for the original "Tonight" which ran between 1980 and 1994. In fact, it was so much in my head that I ended up buying the CD single.

Double in fact, there are quite a few songs on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" that have their status as opening and ending themes for "Tonight" that perhaps I should actually consider putting the title of the show as a new Label. Along with "Aitai", there is Yuiko Tsubokura's（坪倉唯子）"San-byaku-rokujuu-go no Yoru to Hiru"（365の夜と昼）, Tomoko Kuwae's（桑江知子）"Tasogare wo Wine ni Somete"（黄昏をワインに染めて）and Shakatak's "Night Birds".

Well, thanks to Marty McFlies YouTube channel, I was able to discover the opening theme and image song for "Tonight" in 1986. First off is "Nightwalker", sung and composed by Yusuke Kuwahara（桑原佑典）, which was that image song. I'm not sure whether it was actually used in the commercials for the show or it popped up during the introduction of certain segments. Looking up Kuwahara's name, I couldn't find any other works that he was responsible for, but for "Nightwalker", it is pretty evident that he enjoyed Matt Bianco's "Whose Side Are You On?". The lyrics were provided by SHOW. Meanwhile, Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）arranged everything.

At 4:08 of the same video above is "(Misty) Tonight" which was the mostly instrumental opening theme for "Tonight" as performed by Midnight Fox. Steave MacDonald was behind both words and music for this tropical resort pop concoction; Kazuo Otani（大谷和夫）was the arranger here. As for why I've put up the brackets around the first word, although the liner sheet for the single (as shown above while the video is playing) just has the single word "Tonight", apparently the JASRAC database has listed the song under the two words. Despite the lateness of the hour that the show starts up, when I do hear "(Misty) Tonight", I still feel like some sort of daytime cocktail such as a huge margarita.

Platinum 900 -- Ima Sugu Juwaki wo Totte（今すぐ受話器を取って）

 

Gonna be starting off City Pop Friday with another track from Platinum 900's "Concerto für Jazz, Disco and Bossa Nova" which came out in 1998. "Kayo Kyoku Plus" contributor HRLE92, who first wrote about the album, and I share something in common in that the both of us love it when we encounter a hidden treasure, and although I knew that J-R&B was coming into its own around the end of the 20th century with hip-hop and other forms of the rhythm and blues, it was truly a revelation for me (as it was, I'm sure, for HRLE92) regarding this late 1990s album filled with some old-school funk and disco.

As my fellow collaborator mentioned in his own article, Platinum 900 is seen as one of the overlooked City Pop bands, and once again, I'm going to be plucking out another track from "Concerto für Jazz, Disco and Bossa Nova" as I did with Track 3, "Mercedes Life". The first three tracks, in fact, have been described by HRLE92 as groovy City Pop tunes, and the first track, "Ima Sugu Juwaki wo Totte" (Pick Up That Phone Right Now) has got plenty of groove, funk and propulsion, thanks to the rhythms generated by the bass, guitar and the claps. Heck, I can even hear a 1970s City Pop synthesizer haze effect in there! Lyricist/singer Naoko Sakata（坂田直子）seems to be encouraging all those listeners to pick up the receiver right now as if they were still owning old-fashioned home phones with buttons or even the ancient dial. 

Guitarist and bassist Kazuhiko Nishimura (西村一彦) came up with the basic melody and together with keyboardist Hiroshi Iihoshi (飯星裕史), the entire band worked on the arrangement. I will have to cover that second track "Apple" to complete the groovy trio for the album.