Matthew Krouse
CD OFTHEWEEK
Evaluating the quality of foreign music is a tough task. If you don’t know anything about Japanese music, for example, and you get to hear it, how do you know whether you’re in the presence of brilliance or mediocrity? Especially since Japanese vocal music, in particular, is full of strained notes and guffaws quite uncharacteristic of traditional Western tones.
Now a brave Californian-Canadian called Bob Brozman has made Nankuru Naisa (World Music Network), a musical link with Okinawan Takashi Hirayasu that, however surprising it may seem when one hears it, begins with a slightly worn-out premise. The saccharine idea that artists can still get together to undertake collaborations in an effort to find common ground is tired, to say the least. One has to ask oneself: is there cross-cultural life after Ry Cooder? He, after all, was collaborating with individuals like Ali Farka Toure and Shoukichi Kina in the early Nineties.
From the start, it must be said that the marriage of country music and traditional Japanese music is not entirely original. Yet it comes across magnificently on Hirayasu’s and Brozman’s album, their follow-up to the 1999 Jin Jin/Firefly.
Of course, the fast tracks sound like mad variations of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. But it is the slow songs, void of any trace of Western sound, that really shine out. The poetry that Hirayasu writes and sings, even in translation, is shamefully beautiful dedicated to friends, parents and the island of his birth. After listening to the album, there is no suggestion at all that it has been manufactured by hackneyed copycats.