Shay shay, sugar hips! Please hoping sir you did manage enjoy audio equivalent of hot steaming bowl of chicken’s feet that was February’s Dancing Meatcutter Event. All the finest treasures of the orient, clubbed and catalogued for your pleasure. In fact there were so many we couldn’t fit them all in the crate-hole; and will be sailing back later in the year for PART 2, so don’t you even think of not being up for a bit of it.
First up! Why not a bit of a Rumba, with “Rumba Tokio” (1939) by Yuri Akemi. Absolutely no clue or info about either. That is a good start. Whey Yang, it’s off to the North East of China for “I Am A Stockman For The Commune”. It’s by Xu Guizhu and can be found, mewling away in a basket, on the Folk Songs of Northeast China Vol. 1 album compilation of compiled songs.Absolutely no clues about the next ditty, neither. This is going to be a very short internet page, it is becoming clear.
Thanking heavens for Excavated Shellac, for they normally have some good blurb we can mercilessly plunder. And it’s the case here for Thai jowell-abuser Seeranii with “Dao-Thong, Pt. 2”(“Golden Star”).
In particularly hot and humid areas – perhaps Siam for instance, where this recording was made ca. 1927 – recording engineers would often have to pack their wax masters in dry ice to protect them from melting. Working without electricity…sometimes recording entire orchestras who played into a large horn…carting boxes of heavy equipment and hundreds of wax masters from place to place, perhaps country to country, for sometimes months at a time…the odds seemed against these expeditions. Yet many hundreds of thousands of records, perhaps even several million, were recorded all over the world before the microphone started appearing in recording studios in the mid-1920s.
Time for our first sacked-in-shame Geisha who went on rebelliously make saucy recordings of popular music to the chagrin of furrowed empirical beaurocrats: Crikey, it’s Katsutaro Kouta and her little cracker, “Okesa Odori”(1934) – this being a spiffing example of prime Ryūkōka, a bunch of early Japanese pop music forged from skimming the good stuff from western pig-dogs and twisting it up nicely, becoming a most excellent way for teen-agers to really quite ruffle up the tempers of the village elders. Them pesky youngsters with their scrapes! A just-as-pesky war came along and stopped all that, though, so in that vein let us settle down for a sombre outpouring of some more earnestly traditional gumption;At this point the next song was going to be “Ai Shite Choudai” by Sato Chiyako, perhaps even “Hoshi ha Nandemo Shitte Iru” but frankly we don’t trust your abilities to keep a straight face and pure heart, and so don’t deserve either, or their accompanying piece, Fujiyama Ichirou’s “Kage O Shitaite”. IT IS YOUR LOSS. As punishment, instead you can have the sensible and puritanical traditional Chinese missive “Pooi Gut“. Let it learn ye.
Ever wondered what a bunch of Japanesey gentlefolk sound like taking the ripped michael out of traditional Russian Meatcuttery? Step up for a dose of “Kirameku Subaru” (1950). It’s probably not about a car. It gets quite Christmassy at one point. Aoki Kouichi did this. He’s still going, it seems. Nice bow-tie, Aoki, does it spin roond?
This isn’t going very well.
The accidental chrissymissy theme continues with Kawada Masako, caw-cawing a right old squawl with “Tongari Boushi” (1947) and then Enomoto Kenichi and Ike Mariko’s take on “Kouun no Nakama” (1946). It might be meant to be comical, it has sound effects.
Some FIERCE banging away next – Phwooooooar, Ichi no Maru is going it some right some for her rendition of “Shamisen Boogie Woogie”(1949). (No relation to the Shopping Boogie from January’s show, or Tokyo Boogie-Woogie from December’s.)
A bit of stand-up comedy will now follow up by way of an interval, help yourself to a cone while they rattle on.
Ah, that’s fine, to hoy them off along comes Burmese mountain song “Yein Pwe” from the Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics 1918-1955 collection we rifled through in the last show. ‘unknown musicians’ did this. Another ziiiinger!
More grief: “Tieng ai Tram Bong” by Ban-nhac Than-kimb (Vietnam, 1930). String Of Pearls: Jewels Of The 78rpm Era 1918-1951. (There’d be a link here but the only purchase link available is from amazon, that’s no good.)
Yet more grief: “Songs in Grief”, by Kouran Kin/Sinkou Son, Japan, another steal from the Black Mirror collection.
Right, GRIEF SECTION OVER. You’ve earned your jollity, so lap it up like pre-payday puddlewater: The “Chinese Laundry Blues” by your pals Jack Hylton & His Orchestra. Unavoidably, this necessitates you having to suffer two minutes of relentless bellendery from scraggy band mascot G**** F***** who sneaks in through the back and makes a very rare vocal appearance here in our little hovel, but we’ll soon be shut of him.
Feeling suitably jaunty, it is calypso time, so slip your maracas yonderway and get into raunch position ; Tomoko Takara’s here to regale ye with “Japanese Calypso”. Yes, yes, it does feature the word “night crub”. What of it, oh perfect of palate? AY AY AY! Stick on the dance floor, for there’s more, Toshiko Yamaguchi steps up to the plate with “Tokyo Conga” (1950). We implore you to swivel hips, don’t fight it.
WINDING DOWN, winded, “Pon Poko Tanuki Hayashi”, another wallop from the Pom Poko soundtrack, will accompany you back to your floorside seat.
After a bit of unidentifiable but saucy uk’ule’layle-ing, you’d best be back ready for action, it’s back to feet for those hip cats around town, The Black Cats, to suki-suki you into submission with this month’s grande finale, “Mikansei Rockambo (Unfinished Rockambo)”, which sounds finished enough to us, what else would you want?
Well, time is up, tick clong, but part 2 of this journey will be continuing later in the year. Back to normal for March.
In t’meantime, some further listenin’ of the easy nature? These biffers will plug a hole:
Not as good as us but it’s something.
Until the next one, Sayonara, peachies! Say yer nara!
