This next one, for me, has been pretty special ever since I received it. It took me a while to pinpoint why exactly I loved Tomoyuki Asakawa’s Relaxation Music For Harp And Wave. Everytime I put it on bits and pieces of familiarity crept into my subconscious. I kept thinking the whole time: “I’ve heard this before”. Every time, I just couldn’t place it where. Led by the heavenly-sounding harp playing of Tomoyuki Asakawa and accompanied, mostly, by field recordings of water streams (rivers, shorelines, and creeks) and sometimes by piano or violin, Relaxation Music For Harp And Wave touches on some, quite of quiet, beautiful feeling. But what is it?
You wouldn’t know it, but nearly all the songs here are Tomoyuki’s reinterpretations of those from the classic American songbook. These are the things I had to piece together to understand where Tomyuki was coming from. Taking lyrical and atmospheric inspiration from the nostalgic romanticism a lot of truly American music has, Tomoyuki tapped into something quite special. It’s the reason I realized I’ve heard these before.
On those songs, Tomoyuki, most famously known for his CM and behind the scenes studio work before then, took to the forefront to reimagine something as sweet and simple as Ralph Blane’s “The Boy Next Door” from Judy Garland’s ‘40s musical Meet Me in St. Louis as an impressionist tapestry like “ザ・ガール・ネクスト・ドア” that practically begs for its own scene. Rather than keep a distance from the lineage of all this music, he went deep, as in pieces by Gershwin and Mexican classical master Manuel Ponce (whose “Estrellita” gently rocks you into the album) to expand further where that personal musical vocabulary can flow.
My favorite of all these songs are the compositions Tomoyuki digs deep from our American musical well. From the second track to the fourth, three songs from American Romantic composer Edward MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches get a further, divine musical touch, rendered as featherlight ambient pieces where all the impressionistic essences of the original get a renewed focus. If you can remember Vince Guaraldi’s work on A Charlie Brown Christmas, transforming Christmas music by reducing it to a palette to play off from, Tomoyuki brings that same spirit here. Even without a text translation you can place these songs somewhere in your experience because you have heard them before.
You hear the influence of Appalachia and the early western music of America, obvious technical touchstones for Tomoyuki, but you also hear it inviting itself into this, new Japanese idea of “environmental music” being expanded upon, too. “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’m In”, the 6th track, and “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton”, the 5th, by Jonathan E. Spilman — two aspirational ideas joined in a just universe — float along in Tomoyuki’s womb-like instrumentals.
The album ends on a Tomoyuki original “かげろうたちの夢”, to go along with another, the 8th track “埠頭にて”, both songs gorgeous expressions of all this other music as lived by him. The first one is a trio of harp, guitar, and water wave inviting you to put yourself by Tokyo’s seaside wharf where Tomoyuki would go to watch the horizon and escape from the sea of high rises, traffic, and quotidian life, for a brief respite in nature. The final track then lets you imagine, as best one will ever do, someone else’s dream, in this case Tomoyuki’s, as it shifts through all sorts of sonic blends until it reaches a sort of peaceful pace. Flow river flow, until the space between light and day, fits music fit for a relaxed slumber (in someone else’s mind).
The sea always returns the human mind to a very natural state. We trust waves and human dialogue, with the sound of the guitar and harp, to arrange it.
– Tomoyuki Asakawa, from liner notes to Relaxation Music Harp and Wave
Relaxation Music Harp and Wave
- Estrellita – Composition: Manuel Ponce
- To A Wild Rose – Composition: Edward MacDowell
- At An Old Trysting Place – Composition: Edward MacDowell
- To A Water-Lily – Composition: Edward MacDowell
- Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen – Composition: African-American Spiritual
- Flow Gently, Sweet Afton – Composition: Jonathan E. Spilman
- Porgy and Bess – Composition: George Gershwin
- At the Wharf – Composition: Tomoyuki Asakawa (Original)
- The Boy Next Door – Composition: Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin
- Dreams of Kaneshiro – Composition: Tomoyuki Asakawa (Original)