You know, it goes without saying that a lot of what I try to do on the blog is simply fill in the blanks. In the case of The Gentle Wind’s Tears Of Nature, you could say the blanks are as important as the known knowns. First of all, great thanks go out to YouTube user, yaoiboi92, who runs two video channels featuring great little-known Japanese music. At the beginning of 2021’s summer, on their “b-side” channel, they shared a little-known environmental music album by a group called The Gentle Wind. For the fortunate few of us who stumbled on this music beforehand, it felt great to finally have this little secret out there. Divorced from any prior knowledge, you could imagine how virgin ears might have thought this was the work of some forgotten luminaries of Japanese ambient music, only to discover that’s not the case.
The Gentle Wind was the vision of huge Japanese idol Naoko Kawai and long-time collaborator/producer Mickie Yoshino from Godiego (no relation…). If you can put yourself in Naoko’s shoes, can you imagine the conceit of casually putting out an instrumental ambient record at the height of your long-awaited pop release? In essence, that’s what Naoko decided to do.
Nearly a decade into her career, Osaka’s own Naoko had decided to express this other side she had hidden in her solo career. By 1986, she had grown into a songwriter, trying to take the reins of a trajectory almost completely dominated by men writing her music, composing her songs. Albums from that year like スカーレット and her work with Nao & Nobu and Tranzam II displayed an artist aware and surprisingly versed in deeper styles found within the realm of jazz, rock, and urban soul music.
Three years later, perhaps due to the madness of being such an in demand artist whose label pumped out all sorts of product to lace their pockets, Naoko absconded from various attempts by others to write songs for them and saved her best work for herself. This was the year she wanted to hunker down and truly do music that spoke to her, by her.
The “mature” pop release would be 1989’s quite swaggering Calling You supplanting the increasingly dated-sounding City Pop-esque music pushed by her label in comps and best-ofs. Tucked away on Columbia’s jazz-oriented Interface record label would be her labor of love, a side project she recorded immediately before, in “off” sessions with her co-conspirator from that album.
Inspired by the music of Erik Satie, not a new thing by any stretch in that era’s Satie-crazed Japan, but also by the music she stumbled upon dubbed “environmental music”, Naoko, basically, said: that’s what I want to do. This was the New Age music she felt a kinship to.
Knowing she couldn’t exactly release it under her own name, Naoko struck on the idea posed by Mickie. How about releasing it under an alias? She could go by her birth name, Nahoko as she went by in this release, of course, but that might not be enough to cement the difference. Looking at photos of nature she loved to take, the ones that would adorn this album, Naoko came to a plain conclusion: “we’re the gentle wind”. Just as easy going as she thought the kind of music she wanted to make was, so named was the band.
Naoko had befriended Mickie on sessions for Masterpieces 河合奈保子作品集 and felt that he understood what she wanted to do. So out of that creative relationship led her most mature albums yet. All pushing the envelope in their own way. What would become of Tears Of Nature would be their most revelatory collaboration.
Together, Naoko would task herself to compose nearly everything on the album. Mickie would task himself to arrange them and hand these scores or electronic scratch tracks off to a talented bunch of friends and musicians like Ken Watanabe, Daisuke Kume, and more, all from Japan’s evolving fusion scene, letting them fill in the contours of Naoko’s musical drawings.
Mysterious melodies pointed to Naoko’s conscious reimagining of what environmental music meant to her. As noted in the original liner notes, Naoko spoke of wanting to find that conscious connection traditionally Japan had between nature and spirituality. Rather than entirely run away from her classical upbringing, on Tears Of Nature (ティアズ・オブ・ネイチュア) she leans deeply into her obvious deep melodic knowledge. It’s why she became the youngest female composer to join Japan’s Composer Association. That’s why the bubbling, floating, opener, “Water Mind”, as much as it seems part of the aesthetic heard in the music of Inoyama Land and others, can segue into something a bit less clinical and more mercurial, and intimate, approximating the contours of that “organic music” aspired to by Don Cherry (among others).
Songs like “Teardrops-Raindrops” likewise, aren’t afraid of seeking guidance from the equally gentle easiness of much maligned Easy Listening, tweaking their slice of nostalgia with wonderfully atmospheric touches. Once you hear a song like “Feeling Flows” you can appreciate shared wavelengths heard in the work of other musicians like Yassue, Yumiko Morioka, Hajime Mizoguchi, and Yukie Nishimura, all artists who shared that same unabashed love for bittersweet romanticism tinged with heavy loads of experimental sonic meditation. Not quite neoclassical nor icy modal jazz, songs like these are uniquely theirs. In a way, hearing this album play out, you could sense that the coming of a new decade spurred them to carve out a niche they could easily inhabit.
My current highlight from the album, “The Time Between Me And Waves (1st Movement)”, paints the perfect picture of what draws you into this album. Beginning with the sound of surf, the track builds its way up to a powerfully moving crescendo, a dance between piano, fretless bass, and this overwhelming, sweeping, electronic orchestration that imposes itself like the ocean. Then as soon as it crests, you feel the music gently ebb you down, with an emotional heft that rings true to its very personal writing.
Off in the horizon, one can see that The Gentle Wind would release another album a year later, a collection called a Gentle Voice. For the moment, somehow, concentrate on this one, as you’ll hear in the other tracks, the kind of atmosphere, the environment, the group could create is truly something — something that leaves you wondering just what might have been if Naoko had kept exploring this other side of her. My hope (if one’s allowed these days) is that if America gets their introduction to Naoka, please let it be through her vision.