Word: sakamoto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Takashi Sakamoto might be the most hated man in the Japanese publishing business. The founder and president of Japan's largest used-book store chain, Bookoff, is routinely accused of everything from unfair competition to cheating authors out of their royalties to corrupting Japan's youth. One newspaper recently suggested that his company was a threat to Japanese culture itself, while others charge that he is single-handedly destroying the nation's book industry...
...become global without being globalized, to step on the world playing field without being ground into it. In today's global music, musical boundary hopping is often integral to a political message, as when Haiti's Boukman Eksperyans sets a Creole antiwar chant to the tune of Kyu Sakamoto's 1963 single Sukiyaki, an American chart topper by way of Japan. (For Bookman, even singing in Creole--which has periodically been outlawed in Haiti--is a political act.) Protest singers in Africa and the Caribbean have long preached a musical and lyrical Pan-Africanism, from Kuti's mondo-Afro beats...
...souls of the dead are said to return home. Crowds of mourners scale this mountain on this day every year to remember the disaster. They all fall silent as Diana Yukawa, 15, picks up her violin. She shuts her eyes and plays a tune by the singer Kyu Sakamoto, who also died in the crash. The song topped charts around the world in 1963 (in the U.S., it was called Sukiyaki) and is popular again in Japan thanks to the plaintive rendition Diana plays in sold-out concerts and on a best-selling debut CD, which is dedicated...
...Some tunes wore their otherness proudly. It was hard to ignore that Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" was Spanish or that "Sukiyaki" by Q (Kyu) Sakamoto was Japanese; those were the languages the tunes were sung in. Even a few translated songs had the novelty of distance and difference - "Skokian," for instance. As I recall the English lyric, it wore its ethnographic condescension jovially: "Oh, far away in Africa,/ Happy happy Africa,/ They do a bingo-bongo-bingo/ In hokey-smoky-Skokian...
...agile Sakamoto draws on an eclectic background to make this work of solo piano pieces worthy of serious listening, not just aural wallpaper for wine-and-cheese parties. A piano prodigy and student of classical Eastern music, Sakamoto had a brief fling as a Japanese rock star in the 1980s and dabbled in jazz before turning to Hollywood (where his sublime score for The Last Emperor brought him an Oscar). Like all his work, BTTB ("Back to the Basics") searches for common ground in classical, pop and Eastern music. More often than not in this CD of unaccustomed beauty...