Milestones

Yumi Matsutoya

Name: Yumi Matsutoya – Hikouki gumo
Item: Hikouki gumo
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Hikouki gumo

1973 (Express)

new music, singer-songwriter

by Federico Romagnoli

Yumi Arai was born in Tokyo in 1954, into a well-off family of kimono manufacturers. Her artistic bent was clear from childhood: she took piano lessons, sang in a choir and listened to classical music. As a teenager she fell in love with rock, buying records at shops on the American military base in Tachikawa and going dancing at clubs in Roppongi, but she was equally drawn to jazz, frequenting historic venues like Shinjuku's ACB and Ikebukuro's Drum.

It was in these circles that she met a number of musicians, some already established, like Katsumi Kahashi, guitarist with the Tigers (one of the leading bands of the group sounds movement, the local take on beat music), others still up-and-coming, like Haruomi Hosono, future member of Happy End and of the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

She starts writing her own songs quite early on. In 1971 she presents "Ai wa totsuzen ni" ("愛は突然に", "Love Comes Suddenly") to Kahashi, who is trying to establish himself as a solo artist after leaving the band. It's a ballad she's had in a drawer for a while, and her friend immediately takes to it. For Arai, this is the turning point: while the track is being recorded, music publisher and producer Kunihiko Murai asks who wrote it, and shortly after gets in touch with its author. The song doesn't become a hit, but that hardly matters: the following year, at just eighteen, Arai is signed by the local division of Emi, who places her with subsidiary label Liberty.

Her first single, "Henji wa iranai" ("返事はいらない", "I Don't Need a Reply"), was released on 5 July 1972 and sold a mere three hundred copies. Even so, the label kept faith in the young artist and moved her to another subsidiary imprint, Express, where she began recording her debut album.

The process proved to be a particularly tortuous one, with the sessions dragging on for over a year. "Hikouki gumo" ("ひこうき雲", "Vapor Trail", also transliterated as "Hikō-ki gumo", as seen on the cover) was released on 20 November 1973.

The instrumental parts were recorded fairly quickly, but the vocal tracks required endless adjustments, since Arai had not yet fully mastered her own technique: she relied too heavily on vibrato, struggled with pitch, and worried about damaging her vocal cords through overexertion.

The team backing her was made up of Masataka Matsutoya (keyboards), Tatsuo Hayashi (drums), Haruomi Hosono (bass) and Shigeru Suzuki (guitar). It was an exceptional quartet: the first two had risen to prominence playing for Takuro Yoshidawho was at the time the leading singer-songwriter on the local scene; the other two, besides having been friends of Arai's since before she decided to become a professional musician, were members of Happy End, a folk rock band that struggled to gain commercial traction but was regarded with real interest by industry insiders. Hosono and Hayashi had also already played on "Misora" ("みそら"), the debut album by Sachiko Kanebonu, released in September 1972 and generally considered the first record of Japanese female singer-songwriter music.

While Kanebonu's record, released by the independent label Urc, goes largely unnoticed - so much so that the artist won't return to recording until 1987 - a very different fate awaits Arai. While Emi's backing certainly made a difference in this respect, it must be said that "Hikouki gumo" is a far more original and ambitious record than "Misora", which owed heavy debts to the early albums of Joni Mitchell.

Besides singing, Arai plays acoustic piano and writes every song without any outside contribution. Production duties fall to the aforementioned Murai, one of the local scene's grey eminences since 1967, here assisted by young producers Tsuneo Ariga and Toshifumi Mutoh (the latter would go on to work with such successful acts as Off Course and Akira Terao). The sound engineer is Norio Yoshizawa, usually involved in projects far removed from pop music (worth noting is his presence on Hozan Yamamoto's “Silver World”, a landmark 1971 jazz fusion album, and on Flower Travellin' Band's “Satori”, also from '71, a cult favorite among fans of the most psychedelic hard rock).

In hindsight, “Hikouki gumo” can be identified as the album that completes the movement's evolution new music, a kind of local equivalent to what in Italy we call “canzone d'autore” [singer-songwriter tradition]: it began at the dawn of the the Seventies with Takuro Yoshida's breakthrough, under the banner of folk rock, then expanded by Yosui Inoue, who kept the folk roots but added orchestral arrangements and a cross-pollinating approach that winks at contemporary British music (in particular, the glam and the progressive rock), and finally brought by Arai into openly pop territory.

This doesn't mean the singer-songwriter's innovations are lesser than those of her two colleagues, but rather that they move in different territory: while the meter of her vocal lines is decidedly more linear, harmonically her melodies are more complex, with nods to jazz and Western classical music. Among the influences the artist has cited, two stand out: the Procol Harum and the flamboyant French singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff, who at the time was enjoying remarkable, if unexpected, commercial success in Japan.

The tracklist opens with the title track, introduced by piano and Hammond organ working through a Bach-likeprogression, over which Arai's voice glides limpidly, before soaring in the final chorus, colored by the unusual choice of a minor chord on the fifth.

The delicate, melancholy atmosphere is no accident: the song is dedicated to a grade-school classmate of hers, who suffered from a severe form of muscular dystrophy. The boy died when Arai was in her first year of high school: years later she would recall attending his funeral, and how the illness had left him so changed it had distorted the features of his face.

The white hillside path led toward the sky,

a swaying haze enveloped it,

no one noticed it, it was alone,

He rose,

fearless, he flew toward the sky.

Admiring the sky,

he ran straight through it,

that boy's life was a vapor trail.

From that high window, before dying,

he watched the sky. Now I don't understand,

no one can understand,

I think he was too young,

but he was happy

“Kumori zora” is a jazz-inflected track, with extended chords, Wurlitzer piano, flute flourishes (played by guest Akira Miyazawa, one of the biggest names in Japan's local jazz scene) and a groove bossa nova marked out by triangle and percussion, while the uptempo soul uptempo of “Koi no Super Parachuter” is marked by the presence of the Singers Three, a vocal trio featured on dozens of Japanese productions of the era.

“Kitto ieru” is another pop-jazz hybrid, with Hosono on classical guitar and a sax solo played by Konosuke Saijo, a veteran of the local scene active since the 1950s. It's perhaps the most harmonically skewed track of the bunch, with constant shifts in key.

Arai's piano shines through the midtempo of “Velvet Easter”, driven by cymbal triplets in the chorus and by hand-clapping in the finale. The relaxed vocal approach is again explained by the lyrics, which paint the static, suspended atmosphere of a rainy holiday morning.

Pasqua di velluto,

mattina piovigginosa,

la finestra è piena di gocce lucenti,

vieni a prendermi,

ho ancora sonno, ma bussa alla mia porta.

Il cielo sembra così basso,

come se un angelo stesse scendendo,

è la mia stagione preferita,

una domenica diversa dal solito.

Decoro con i fiori un cappello bianco

che ho comprato ieri,

I'll wear the boots

that my mother used to like

The last star guest, in order of appearance, is Hiroki Komazawa, who with his pedal steel guitar infuses tones country of rock into the ballad "Kami hikouki". Towards the end of the tracklist, "Henji wa iranai" reappears, the debut single, but while the 7" version was a ballad for voice and piano alone, this time the arrangement is layered and lively, particularly from 1' 26" onward, thanks to an instrumental break with Caribbean influences, punctuated by the sound of a cowbell.

It's a love song, but here too it's handled with delicacy, avoiding mawkish atmospheres in favor of a healthy dose of nostalgia.

By the time this letter reaches you

I might not be here anymore,

if I stay still in the same place

I worry about unimportant things and end up wanting to see you.

From the book you lent me

I copied out my favorite words

at the end of the letter,

so that you can appreciate them too.

In this faraway city

I want to know about you,

but when I remember you, tears flow,

[so] I don't need an answer.

By the time this letter reaches you

I might not be here anymore,

if I stay alone

I can clearly see what happened yesterday

The often intimate, diary-like tone of Arai's songs would prove to be one of the winning traits of the new musicdespite the absence of any overt social commitment, these are songs that stand in contrast with the shouted emotions and tear-jerking pathos of theenka and the other forms of Japanese popular music beloved up until the the Sixties.

“Hikouki gumo” didn't immediately achieve the hoped-for success, nor did the following “Musslim” (1974) and “Cobalt Hour” (1975), for that matter.

In the second half of '75, however, things changed: in autumn the folk duo BanBan scored a huge hit with their ballad “Ichigo hakusho wo mou ichido” (いちご白書をもう一度, “The Strawberry Statement, Once Again”), whose title is drawn from the film “Fragole e sangue” (1969, directed by Stuart Hagmann), while shortly after it was her own turn, with the seductive “Ano hi ni kaeritai” (あの日にかえりたい, “I Want to Go Back to Those Days”), used as the theme for the hit TV series “Katei no himitsu” (家庭の秘密, “Family Secrets”).

Both tracks reach number 1 on the Oricon singles chart, and from that moment Arai becomes a star, to the point that the three albums released up to that point all chart simultaneously: "Cobalt Hour" climbs to number 2 (462,000 copies sold during its time in the top 100), "Musslim" reaches number 8 (275,000 copies) and "Hikouki gumo" number 9 (279,000 copies).

This would prove to be just the start of a triumphant rise that would bring her unprecedented popularity, especially in the early the NinetiesTo this day, Arai is generally regarded as the queen of Japanese music, both for the consistent quality of her output (which of course would evolve over time, embracing electronic music starting in the the Eightiesand for her staggering sales figures, which to date amount to roughly 33 million albums and 10 million singles, not counting the digital market.

However, even taking into account the quality of many of her later works (worth noting in particular is her mature-period masterpiece, “Delight Slight Light Kiss,” which in 1988 would kick off the most successful phase of her career), it remains hard to overstate the influence exerted by “Hikouki gumo” on the Japanese scene, which from that point on would produce numerous top-tier singer-songwriters (above all, Miyuki Nakajima and Mariya Takeuchi, just to name two who, in the local imagination, join Arai on an imaginary female podium ofShowa era).

Trivia

– Starting in 1976, the singer has gone by the name Yumi Matsutoya, having married the keyboardist who played on this, her debut album, and who would go on to produce all her subsequent work.

– In 2013 the title track of "Hikouki gumo" was used by Hayao Miyazaki as the theme for the film "The Wind Rises".

Thanks to J-Canuck for the translation of the lyrics to "Henji wa iranai", and see the following article by Motoaki Sasaki for a deeper biographical look at the artist.

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26/11/2023

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. ひこうき雲 (Hikouki gumo / Vapor Trail)
2. 曇り空 (Kumori zora / Cloudy Weather)
3. 恋のスーパー・パラシューター (Koi no Super Parachuter / Super Parachuter of Love)
4. 空と海の輝きに向けて (Sora to umi no kagayaki ni mukete / Toward the Sky and Gleaming Sea)
5. きっと言える (Kitto ieru / I Know I Can Tell You)
6. ベルベット・イースター (Velvet Easter)
7. 紙ヒコーキ (Kami hikouki / Paper Plane)
8. 雨の街を (Ame no machi o / In the Rainy Town)
9. 返事はいらない (Henji wa iranai / No Need to Reply)
10. そのまま (Sono mama / Don't Change)
11. ひこうき雲 (Hikouki gumo / Vapor Trail)