The sound of Matsutoya’s voice is the central appeal of this for me, as it must be when the language barrier prevents me understanding what she sings. For all their longevity, Scaggs and McDonald haven’t sold 42 million albums. Few managed the transition in the US or UK as well as Matsutoya did in Japan. In 1983, smoothness – as exemplified by Scaggs, Kenny Loggins (pre- Footloose and post-Messina), Michael McDonald and so on – was out and the old guard were having to modernise to retain their careers as hitmakers. It’s a startlingly accurate take on a form of pop music that was just beginning to recede in popularity at the song’s parent album, Reincarnation, was released. That is to say, it was a live-and-in-the-wild Japanese take on yacht rock.
#Yumi matsutoya mac#
The use of the orchestra suggest the influence of Barry Gibbs’s production work on Barbra Streisand’s Guilty, the steady mid-tempo rhythm suggests Fleetwood Mac (as does the use of the heartbeat kick drum pattern made ubiquitous by Fleetwood’s use of it on Dreams), there’s a bit of Boz Scaggs in there in the electric piano and soul-derived guitar licks – everything about it signified LA around 1979.
Sophisticated, though, I’d have agreed with. It’s a very close take, too, but I’m not sure how the ILM poster heard this and thought, “Hmm, yes, jazzy”.
(a)(dvd).jpg "yumi matsutoya")
I’d never heard of Yumi Matsutoya, but I was intrigued to listen to a Japanese take on a Western form. Someone posted asking for recommendations for songs by jazz-inflected singer-songwriters I guess they were thinking of stuff in the vein of Paul Simon’s late-seventies work. I first heard this song when reading a thread on the I Love Music message board. Compare that to the commercial fortunes of her western equivalents (even artistic and one-time commercial giants like Joni Mitchell and Carole King) in the same span of time and the scale of those achievements becomes clear. She continues to have hits, and to write them for other artists. She’s sold 42 million records and was the first artist to notch up two million sales in Japan for an album. The magazine Shūkan Gendai ranked Matsutoya third (behind only Miyuki Nakajima and Masayoshi Son) in a list of the smartest Japanese figures that was determined based on the criteria of "intelligence, determination, sensibility and capability".Yumi Matsutoya (born Yumi Arai, and known to her fans as Yuming) has been one of the biggest stars of Japanese pop music for forty years, having released her first single in 1972, aged 18. In addition to multiple hit singles, she has obtained enormous commercial success on the Japanese Albums Chart, particularly during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Throughout the 1980s, Matsutoya's music was prominently featured in advertisements for Mitsubishi Motors in her native Japan and her image was used to promote their vehicles. The album The 14th Moon and the three albums that ranked in the top 10 of the Japanese charts in 1976 ( Cobalt Hour, Yuming Brand, and Hikōki-gumo) "contained several songs which are considered to be early classics of the J-pop genre." Īfter marrying her musical collaborator Masataka Matsutoya in 1976, Arai began recording under her married name and has continued to do so. This musical idiom is generally thought to have been first realised on Cobalt Hour". In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture, it is written that "Yuming incorporated influences from progressive rock and European pop to produce a sophisticated, upper-middle-class female Japanese voice and sound in a contemporary musical and journalistic world dominated by discussions of folk music and social critique. Other famous songs include "Haru-yo, Koi" and "Sweet, Bitter Sweet". She also gained popularity as a vocalist in the same year through the success of "Ano Hi ni Kaeritai", which became her first number-one hit on Japan's Oricon Charts. In 1975, Arai became known as a composer for " Ichigo Hakusho wo Mou Ichido", a commercially successful song recorded by the folk duo BanBan. During her early career, she worked under her birth name Yumi Arai ( 荒井 由実, Arai Yumi ). Īfter gaining several years of experience as a session musician, she debuted as a singer-songwriter in 1972. She is the only artist to have at least one number-one album every year on the Oricon charts for 18 consecutive years.
In 1990, her album The Gates of Heaven became the first album to be certified "2x million" by the RIAJ, and she has had twenty-one No. Her recording career has been commercially successful with more than 42 million records sold.
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