Live House Session in Kanazawa

As many of you know (because I have talked about this on a few occasions in the past), there are a group of extremely talented composer musicians who have their own companies, and do work as session musicians for the big names over here, little sessions at live houses in tours around the country and so forth, that Mayu "follows". These are all connected to Mitsuda Kenichi (piano/composer), that Mayu loves. There are guitarists, violinists, bass, percussion, piano, etc. The kind of musicians that would make up a quartet, or some such "jazz" kind of group.

Yesterday I went with Mayu to Kanazawa because Naoto (an amazing violinist) and three of his six member group, NaoTei, are on tour. Two days ago they had a live session in Tokyo, and yesterday it was here in Ishikawa (prefecture next to where I live, an hour from here on the expressway). Mayu goes when she can, but she doesn't follow Naoto devoutly. Yukiyo, Mayu's girlfriend, however, does. He is extremely talented. (Only three of the six members of this session group are on tour right now because the other three are too busy with other work).

Naoto plays the violin, and play it amazingly well he does! He does a lot of composing for movies, TV dramas, and plays for many of the big voices here.

Tetsuro is an amazing guitarist (and he is gorgeous! He wears shorts all the time and his calves melted me, along with his smile - Can you tell where MY attention was the entire night? heeee). He has a great voice, too. Tetsuro apparently went to a major music university in the USA (Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA - Pat Metheny, John Mayer, Billy Joel, Chaka Khan Quincy Jones, Bruce Hornsby, 2 members of Aerosmith, and more.). He plays for a lot of the major names in Japan (you won't know them). We heard a little bit of his voice when they were getting him to sing the "jazzy-like" "hey ho tadum dedumm dumm" that is not really singing, but more of an instrument in and of itself.

And then Teiho is the composer. He plays apparently over 80% of the instruments you find in a full orchestra. Yes, one of those guys. He was playing the piano and the accordion (the small boxy one, not the big "ukrainian" one I grew up with hearing).

The live session went from 7pm to 9.30. There was full capacity (50 people) in the live house bar. There were ... three men in the audience, and I was one of them. I will let you do the math to figure out which sex follows these kinds of musicians (it's pretty much the same for Mayu's Kenichi Mitsuda, also).

Mayu asked me to bring my IC recorder and pirate the concert so she could send the talking parts, etc. (i.e. the music) to her girlfriend Miyuki, from Osaka, who couldn't make it to this concert. So we did. The quality was pretty good considering we were sitting in the back half of the bar.

Here are two of the nine songs they played. Please click the file attachment at the bottom of this blog. You may like it if you are into "session" stuff, or you may not, depending upon your style of music. You won't find any screaming guitar riffs (Alan), nor any gravelly, marlboro voices (Jen), but if you like Jazz / easy-listening and especially are a fan of apparently very technically complicated music (I can't tell.. I can barely sing "Happy Birthday"), this may speak out to you.

The first song was written by Tetsuro, the guitarist (Song #5). The second song is the "call & response" style of music where they humm, then get the audience to respond in the same way (song #8). Mayu's Ken-chan does this in all of his live sessions.

I love you!

Cam

P.S. If anyone is currently using a teeny little app for playing music directly in a blog (like we insert YouTube coding for videos), please let me know. I'd rather put that directly in the blog than attach the files. Some people can't seem to get these mp3 files to work when I do it this way (and it doesn't use the latest blogging technology this way, either).

Attachment: NaoTei Live Kanazawa 5 081016.mp3
Attachment: NaoTei Live Kanazawa 8 081016.mp3