Tag Archives: Nozomi Tsuji

W “Duo U&U”

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W
Duo U&U
(Zetima)

I don’t know what the exact intentions behind this first album from Morning Musume members Ai Kago and Nozomi Tsuji were, outside of having them do some duo-oriented Showa-period kayokyoku classic hits, but I can tell you one thing they hadn’t counted on that this CD did – it got me even more interested in older Japanese pop music.

See, I knew of Pink Lady because of their short-lived American TV show and their “Kiss In The Dark” single, but I knew very little about what came in Japanese pop before Morning Musume, Whiteberry, Mai Kuraki, and Chihiro Onitsuka. The fifteen covers that Aibon and Nono did on this album – The Peanuts’s “Koi No Vacance” and “Passion Flower”, Pink Lady’s “Southpaw” and “Nagisa no Sinbad”, Amin’s “Matsu Wa”, Wink’s “Samishii Nettaigyo” – ended up being my introduction to all that.

In the months after this album became a frequent visitor to my CD player and a permanent resident in my iPod, I would find myself doing as much research as possible into the original artists that were represented and covered by Aibon and Nono here, to the point where I was buying anthologies from The Peanuts, Wink, and Amin as well as snagging mp3s of the original versions of other songs that W had covered from a LiveJournal trading community. When I got a turntable at the end of 2007, I found myself searching out Japanese vinyl on eBay, scoring albums from Akina Nakamori, Hiromi Iwasaki, and other kayokyoku icons as well as a slew of enka singles that put me on the path to the Japanese balladry known as enka.

That is not to say that Aibon and Nono’s performances on Duo U&U are lackluster – they aren’t. This album and the rest of their output as W remain their finest hours as vocalists, with their almost telepathic harmonies and a rapidly maturing range. These aren’t note-for-note copies of the originals – tempos get taken up a few notches throughout (W’s version of “Koi no Vacance” shows some serious punk influence compared to the original recording’s fox-trot tempo). and compared to the originals W and their in-studio collaborators took a few other liberties with the arrangements. If they hadn’t taken such an investment in these recordings, who is to say that I  wouldn’t have been interested in checking out the original recordings in the first place?

By now, quite frankly, we should be on our sixth or seventh W album by now. But some of Ai Kago’s indiscrections just as their third album W3: Faithful was about to head for the mastering studio held up their collective careers considerably. A year after that, Kago would be released from her contract with Up Front Works, her agency since her Morning Musume days, for a similar indiscretion, while Tsuji would find herself becoming a premature Morning MILF several months after that. While Tsuji found some stability, Kago’s own life was full of ups and downs; even though she did record a pop-rock single in 2009 and a jazz album the year afterward, her personal life hit several potholes until, after a severe low point, she settled down and announced that she was going to be following her fellow ex-W into Morning Motherhood.

MINIMONI “Minimoni Song Daihyakka Ikkan”

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MINIMONI
Minimoni Song Daihyakka Ikkan
(Zetima)
Availability: Out of print (used copies only)

This one’s in honor of Mari Yaguchi’s 29th (!!!) birthday today, since it was an idea of hers to start MiniMoni in the first place. Mari had an idea to start a subgroup for Morning Musume that featured members 150cm and under, and between her and MoMusu’s songwriter/producer Tsunku, the band was formed with her, MoMusu bandmates Ai Kago and Nozomi Tsuji, and American-born Coconuts Musume member (and offspring of jazz pianist Johnny Todd) Mika.

It’s a little disturbing to find that both of MiniMoni’s albums are out of print – both albums were two of the many records that spurred me to get heavier into Japanese music in the first place, and the band itself inspired my Here Is The Wonderland novel project [which I'll be finishing once Resonant Blue is out of my hands and into readers'].

One of the reasons that Minimoni’s music had such a hardcore effect on me was how ridiculously varied their music was – even more so than their mothership group Morning Musume. The band’s first long-player, Minimoni Song Daihyakka Ikkan (translation: Minimoni Song Encylopedia Volume 1), which compiles most of their singles tracks up to that time, runs a bizarre gamut of styles. Of course, their first single, “Minimoni Jankenpyon”, should have been the first clue as to what these girls were going to deliver: mariachi horns, drum-and-bass (the EDM style) loops, synth bass from a Mini-Moog (no pun intended – not by me, anyway) and some bizarre lyrics about playing rock-paper-scissors.

From there, it gets even crazier, touching on everything from martial music, jazz, soul, blues, blues, techno, and whatever else Tsunku’s fertile musical mind could come up with at the time (metal got left out, but an enterprising Minimoni/Hello! Project fan did a homemade Metallica-inspired remix of “Ai-in! Dance no Uta”, one of two tracks done with comedian Ken Shimura’s “Baka Tomo-san” character for a joint single, to make up for it).

Minimoni would do a bunch of other singles, a movie, and another album (which I’ll write about at another time) after a personnel change (Yaguchi left the group, passing the leadership torch to Mika and bringing in another MoMusu member, Ai Takahashi, to round out the new lineup), but by 2004 the project was put in hiatus – Mika went back to America to study music in L.A., Ai Kago and Nozomi Tsuji already had another project, the duo W, to concentrate on (they would be graduating from Morning Musume later that summer), and Ai Takahashi would find herself leading Morning Musume itself in a couple of years.

I miss them.