There always come a point in your life when you just have to say: “fuck it”…and lead with your heart. The late great icon frequently seen in black and white, with smoky cigarette in hand, had lead the life of someone unmoored by her origins in Japan. Deeply tied and influenced by American Jazz and blues music, it was her stretch of 10 albums created in the ‘70s that would cement her name in canon. Countless compilations would also cherry pick from these creations. But for Maki Asakawa, that point, where you really mean it — to “fuck it” all — appeared to occur in 1988, with the appropriately named Nothing At All To Lose, at a point when she really had everything to lose.
Many would label this album a sell out. Where was the queen of dark, brooding Japanese folk, Rock, Blues, and Jazz Vocal Pop? What would her idols, Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson, think of these nine sets of tracks, utterly burning with guttural funk, love, joy, and sex? Would her record company care for an album full of songs stretching well over four minutes long?
There is no easy way to say this but Maki Asakawa had no need for those blues anymore. At this point in her life, it really felt like all she wanted to do was make love. It was a point where the icon reached for its deepest ground.
Just years before Maki had toyed with American funk music. On records released in the mid-80s such as こぼれる黄金の砂~ What It Be Like and アメリカの夜, Maki had featured one or two tracks attempting to marry her vocalese with more uptempo funk. However, for some reason or another, something was always lacking. It always appeared that Maki’s own experimentation was being constricted trying to fit it into a pigeonhole she had dug herself into. It never quite felt like she could unfurl on these tracks and really let it flow. No longer at the vanguard of Japanese rock music, it was OK for her to try something else, but did she know how or what it should be?
A light lit up when she met ex-Rufus bass player Bobby Watson. It was his production and musical ideas on select cuts from those past, aforementioned albums that really spoke to her. His funky cuts were the ones that easily integrated outre jazz leanings without siding away her lived in, musical knowledge/technique. No, these cuts saw the potential in a new stew. In 1988, they went into a studio together and really went to town with that promise, with Nothing At All To Lose.
Somehow, Bobby convinced nearly all of the boys from Rufus to join them in Tokyo and expand a set of songs he had been working with Maki, piecemeal. There would be songs like “Tokyoアパートメント” that reimagined a Quiet Storm floating over Japan with stretched out grooves that seductively beamed with: “hold on and stay around here, for a while”. There would be songs like “KALEIDOSCOPE” that took psychedelic soul detours cycling through Bobby’s and Maki’s fascinating, simpatico harmonizing. There would be Balearic, jazz-funk, pillowy ballads like “アメリカの夜” which practically beg to be played from dance floor to bedroom floor. Most of all, there would be jams…
The titular cut sounds like Anita Baker and Womack & Womack trapezing through Tokyo, discovering some mean hash, laying a cut where all those digital reverb settings the Brothers Johnson would back off on, would be let on, only then sitting back (with cognac in hand) to bask in the afterglow of slaying, twinkly, sweet groove. At a whopping, 8:49 minute long track length, “Love Time” is the mantra of self-love that earns this album’s climax.
A masterpiece of gorgeous, Rufus-like vocal overdubs, and spacious jazz-funk that weaves in Maki’s poignant poetry — both sung and speak-talking, vibed out — into its growing, intoxicating rhythm, at no point of this song there isn’t a second well worth its length. Smoking, in a way that Maki hadn’t been before, “Love Time” deconstructs and reconstructs itself to show the blues in everyone’s burning, hot red. As for the rest of the album? Oof, it ends with quite possibly one of my favorite slow jams ever — an Avalon for those flying high, below the smoky jet stream.