The history of Japanese music and jazz is actually pretty interesting, er, to me at least. While I'm not very familiar with post-WWII Japan, it would seem that along with the rest of world-wide cultural influences came American Jazz. I say "American" to emphasize that it came from America, ahah. Ever since the mid 70's or there abouts, there has a lot of mixing in Japan of their more traditional musics with jazz. The opposite happened, too, where American musicians starting copying the musical style of traditional Japan. Ever since then, and especially in the 80's, Japanese ideas have been used in American music, which was used in Japanese music, and back to America and so on until it's hard to distinguish what aspects came first. Here is an example.
日本のジャズの中で、上原ひろみがいちばんすきです。
My favorite Japanese jazz musician is Uehara Hiromi. In one of her more recent albums, "Beyond Standard," she takes a lot of classic songs and puts her own jazz spin on them. Some you might recognize are Caravan (by Duke Ellington), Clair de Lune (by Debussy), and My Favorite Things (popularized in Sound of Music). But on a CD with largely western songs, I was always baffled by one song whose title is in Japanese. My step-mom recognized it as an American song, but the title seemed to imply it was Japanese. Let's see if you know.
Here is the version she is familiar with:
If you are familiar with older Japanese music (or maybe even not! this guy was really famous), you would have recognized this song as (excuse my poor translation?) "I shall walk looking up" by Kyu Sakamoto. Of course, 日本語で、the song is 「上を向いて歩こう」。
Here is the original:
And of course, this is the song that Hiromi plays in her album.
いいですね~
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