In 2017, the Japanese band Minyo Crusaders released their debut album, Echoes Of Japan (P-Vine, Japan), to great acclaim. The band's reworking and updating of Japanese folk music, or minyo, on a rhythmic bed of Caribbean, Latin and Afrobeat was truly inspired, and perhaps pointed the way for other fusion bands in East and Southeast Asia. The aim was to revive minyo as "music for the people", as quoted by World Music Central.
Photo: John Clewley
It turns out that the musicians behind another Japanese fusion outfit, of Tropique! (yet another unique Japanese band name), were paying attention. The instrumental band will release their debut album, Buster Goes West on the Washington-based Electric Cowbell Records on Feb 2.
The band features some stalwarts of Minyo Crusaders -- clarinet player Teppei Kondo, percussionist Mutsumi Kobayashi and guitarist Rolando Bruno. Minyo Crusaders utilised the sound of Colombian cumbia to great effect and that kind of danceable groove turns up on various tracks on the album.
PR blurb on the band says that the concept of the album is based on the idea of an "Asian guy" who goes to visit a town in a Western country or a series of tropical islands without knowing much about the places he visited. The music, which has elements of lounge and "exotic music" and tropical pop, in addition to the Caribbean and Latin beats mentioned already, is hard to pigeonhole. But it is foot-tapping fun.
At the centre of many of the songs on the album is the "big sound" of Kondo's clarinet playing (a key element in many cumbia songs), created through an old 1927 clarinet which has a bigger borehole than typical and so gives a bigger sound. Indeed, his playing swirls around the music on the album as a clarinettist would on cumbia songs, but there are also riffs that remind of Japanese chindon street music (a trio of drum, clarinet and saxophone used traditionally to advertise the opening of a pachinko parlour) and the fabulous music of Cicala Mvta, a Japanese band that mixes chindon with Balkan and klezmer music. Kondo's playing is a real standout on the album.
The album kicks off with a neo-cumbia opener, Le Guerro, featuring the twangy guitar of Bruno and the screeching clarinet of Kondo before segueing into the title track. There are some surprises, too, like the lovely soft ballad Pearl, which might well give Acker Bilk (those of you old enough may remember his huge international hit Stranger On The Shore) a run for his money.
My favourite tracks though are the cumbia-flavoured songs like Guacharaca Moo Mast and Mr. Picou's Last Trip. But my favourite song so far on this fascinating debut album is the rhythmic clarinet mash-up Twenty Four, which features wild clarinet and guitar and drum solo.
This is an excellent debut from a band that is innovative and fun; perhaps a forward-thinking producer or festival curator might like to bring the band over to Thailand. I would very much like to see them perform live.
Sadly, news that the influential musician and producer Yukihiro Takahashi, a co-founder of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), has died reached the World Beat desk this week. He was 70. Takahashi, known for his drumming and knowledge of electronic music, was also YMO's singer. In a long and prolific career, he recorded some 20 studio albums; he emerged as drummer for the Sadistic Mika Band and later collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto for his 1977 debut album Saravah!, then worked on Haruomi Hosono's album Paraiso.
The three musicians formed the Yellow Magic Orchestra and released their eponymously titled debut album in 1978. The band helped create the synthpop sound, using sampling, computer game sound riffs and drum machines and are often cited as a key influence on the development of J-pop in the 1980s, and on computer and video game creators. YMO was one of the few Japanese bands during the early 1980s to chart in the West, scoring a Top 20 hit in the UK with the single Computer Games and entering the US Billboard album and R&B (YMO was a hit with hip-hop musicians in the US) charts.
All three members of YMO went on to stellar solo careers but continued to work on each other's projects. YMO had several reunions, the first in 1992, and the trio recorded their final studio album Technodon in 1993 (released under the name YMO).
In recent years, some of Takahashi's early work have been reissued on vinyl (as has Haruomi Hosono) and has proved popular with international collectors.
John Clewley can be contacted at clewley.john@gmail.com.
