![]() While mostly hangover from his earliest full-band efforts, solo albums like Hosono House, Tropical Dandy, and Pariso show the beginnings of a musician eager to experiment with new forms. Songs like “Fuyu Goe” and “Jusho Futei Mushoku Tei Shunyu” represent his richest efforts sonically, while softer tracks like “Koi Wa Momoiro” feel like the Japanese equivalent of a tears-in-your-beer Gram Parsons song. With a twang of fingerpicked, bossa nova-esque guitar, album-opener “Rock-A-Bye My Baby” set the tone for an LP of jazz progressions and folky instrumentation with ‘60s surf-pop songwriting at its core. But on his first solo album, 1973’s Hosono House, the musician stripped down the fluffy opulence of earlier big-budget studio efforts to create an album largely built around sparse, acoustic melodies. With Happy End, the bassist crafted near-identical replicas of classics from Randy Newman and The Band on albums like 1971’s Kazemachi Roman. Hosono saw music as a vehicle, an expressive means into the respective histories of American and Japanese culture alike. “Though I learned the importance of roots from West Coast groups, the direct influence was from Japanese literature, especially poetry. Traditional Japanese music, like Shamisen and Shakuhachi, I knew nothing about it,” he said at a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2014. “We were disconnected from our own roots. English-language talk radio blared alongside California psychedelic groups like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, who each paid tribute to the rock and R&B traditions of America in a way that inspired Hosono to question his own relationship with the musical heritage of Japan. military radio stations was still widely popular in the decades after the second World War, and while American occupants throughout the Pacific Islands continued to enjoy a small glimpse of cultural life back home, the broadcasts opened up an entire world of new music to Hosono and other Tokyo youngsters. Though they still haven’t been uploaded to Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal, the albums can still for now be heard on YouTube, where they’ve circulated amongst super-fans for the last few years.īorn in Tokyo in 1947, Haruomi Hosono grew up obsessed with American imports. In 2018, the American archival imprint Light In The Attic Records reissued five of Hosono’s solo albums, making the highly coveted, long out-of-print releases finally available outside of Japan for the first time. Released under the name “Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band,” the album featured early synthesizers like the ARP Odyssey that would become an integral part of the YMO sound in years to come, as well as songs like “Asadoya Yunta” (a traditional Okinawan folk song) that would later be recorded as solo works by Sakamoto and others. In 1978, Hosono joined forces with future Yellow Magic Orchestra members Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi on Paraiso, an album of slinky, funk-inflected rock music that continued Hosono’s fascination with transpacific difference. I was trying to become that exotic world.” ![]() ![]() “Exotica musicians appreciated something far away, and something different. “I was sort of playing a role of comedian,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. Heavily influenced by the so-called “jungle sound” of “exotica” lounge musicians Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, Hosono saw himself as a new kind of artist-prankster, flipping this strange imperialist kitsch (what Edward Said might call Orientalism) into his own blend of dizzying post-colonial critique. While still playing bass with Happy End in the early ‘70s, Hosono began working on a number of solo albums under his own name, frequently anglicized as “Harry” Hosono in the style of Japanese comedians like Frankie Sakai or Tani Kei. ![]()
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