Don’t ask me why but it seems that jewelry companies always find a way to leverage their buying power to commission others to create some of the most interesting music-related value propositions. In plain speak: I’m holding an album, 4℃’s Christmas Suite, given as a holiday gift to (what I imagine) were there well-to-do customers, in 1992, wondering just what exactly they were thinking when they asked guitarist Haruhiko Nishioka (a prodigious composer of anime soundtracks and VGM) to work with environmental music mavens, St. GiGA, and collaborate on such an idea. Listening to this music – a mix of fourth world, New Age, and environmental sound – doesn’t strike me as something their clientele would be into…yet here it is, existing, as some kind of Christmas miracle.
What exactly or who exactly was 4℃? I won’t hold it against you if you don’t know this answer, but the answer belongs to the annals of fashion history. Many moons ago, in the 1950’s Yondoshi Holdings, began as an apparel company that expanded into the jewelry business in 1972, as a means to diversify their offerings towards their largely female demographic.
They’d take the name 4°C in homage to their goal of being as mutable, transparent, and life-sustaining as water. Full of double meaning, 4℃ would also cover the idea of a temperature that water must remain below a solid sheet to sustain life and also the four Cs of jewelry – carat, cut, clarity and color – that covered quality crafted pieces.
20 years after their successful launch, 4℃ decided that the best way to celebrate their anniversary was to create a Christmas album that they could both use to bundle-in as a free gift with their holiday offerings and to give all the proceeds of its creation to a Franciscan order in West Africa. Of course, I’ll leave you to decide just how much of a goodwill gesture it was for a huge jewelry brand to donate (what I imagine) was a pittance to a part of the world they have largely exploited, as many other “high-end” brands do that hawk low-priced jewelry. Be that as it may, what lives on is the kind of thought given by the creators of 4℃’s Christmas Suite to actually show deference to that part of the world and to tie it into a surprisingly seasonal mood.
Three tracks: “At Batie”, “At Gorée”, and “At Draa” refer to specific places in the African subcontinent that its composer, Haruhiko Nishioka, drew inspiration from. The final track, spearheaded by the St. GiGA collective, uses found sounds taken around the world and from live chorale recordings to create a unique mashup of environmental ambience and actual holiday music – all easily heard in a faraway rendition of “Come All Ye Faithful” that brings all of this together.
When I put on Christmas Suite my mind instantly starts to race back to all those albums like Asiabeat’s Spirit Of The People or Nana Vasconcelos’s Rain Dance, albums that have like minded, beat-driven, influences from around the globe. The presence of musicians that straddle the new line of contemporary music like Brazilian experimental multi-instrumentalist Marco Bosco and violinist Yae Nishikawa from Japanese neoclassical group the Shakuyaku Trio adds a unique stamp of trying to understand how to straddle so many lines, those of tradition and diversion, all on the same track successfully.
While who knows how many people received this album, I wager that those who actually got a copy, and took a listen, might have heard enough to see the brand itself in a new light (even if it’s not entirely earned). It’s everything that we’d want a responsible company to be: resourceful, imaginative, and charitable. Such is the power of music, or miracle, perhaps, that what could be a quasi-empty business gesture can be transformed in the hands of tireless workers, into something else, something made full simply by understanding the priceless timeline of labor it took for something to be created.
So, here’s cheers for that this holiday season, and hope that this feeling extends to all taking this in.