If there’s anything I can affirm, after writing so much about music, it’s this: there are no firsts. Of all the good things City Pop’s popularity has done, it’s to reinforce or enlighten others that Japan’s history with soul music runs deeper than we think. And now with a newfound interest in more contemporary J-RnB and J-Hip-Hop (found in the rising popularity of artists like Utada Hikaru or Nujabes), it remains just as important to shine a light on a few artists like Bluesette who unknowingly helped lay the foundation for it, as its popularity surges forward.
Bluesette was the creation of two people: producer/multi-instrumentalist Seiji Motoyama and vocalist/lyricist Hiromi Kuroiwa. Bluesette was born in New York City in 1995, not too far from where Seiji was born in 1967. A “sansei”, third-generation Japanese-American, Seiji like most kids loved music but unlike most kids had a bit more brilliance in him, allowing him to zoom through school in his native Long Island, leading him to enroll in Ohio’s prestigious Oberlin College (and its Conservatory of Music) at the ripe age of 15, studying computer music, composition, and arrangement.
By age 20, Seiji had spent a spell in Japan and returned back to America, where his honed skills in music production and sound engineering found him working in New York City recording studios on sessions for artists like Teddy Riley, Keith Sweat, and other American artists at the forefront of the contemporary R&B movement, staying close to the urban soul scene he grew up listening to. With time, Seiji’s deep ties to New York City’s New Jack Swing movement would lead him to work on records for big names like SWV, Color Me Badd, and many more. Then in 1992, working under aliases like One For The Treble or Dai Bass, Seiji would release house singles like “Bop City” on storied labels like Strictly Rhythm and “Reach Out Of The Darkness” on the lesser-known Active Records.
What made Bluesette truly special was Seiji’s connection with Hiromi Kuroiwa. Unlike Seiji, little biographical information exists about her. What we can infer or see, is Hiromi’s equally deep connection to America and its soul scene. Before Bluesette’s creation, we can track Hiromi’s musical career starting years earlier in 1992, as a member of US girl group, Oscar.
In those heady years in the early ’90s when record labels and musicians were looking for a female answer to the heavily male-centric New Jack Swing scene, groups and artists like En Vogue, TLC, Shanice and others were being created left and right by production teams looking to capitalize on a neglected audience. It’s within this scene that then-struggling music producers Charles Farrar and Troy Taylor, better known as The Characters, conceived of the idea of a multi-racial girl group whose identity could set them apart from the pack.
It was this New Jill Swing group, Oscar, that invited New York-based Japanese singer Hiromi Kuroiwa to join and eventually turn out to write a decent amount of their music. On videos and on record, this noble effort (more than partly tied to capitalist enterprise) gamely found Hiromi appearing in music videos and even led to Oscar’s music being released and promoted worldwide. In the end, grand designs have their flaws, and Hiromi’s first attempt to make a name for herself as an American R&B singer fell by the side as singles like “I’m Calling You (Do-Po-Liddle-Lo-Le-Yeah)” and “Keep Touching Me” lost out to much more contemporary-sounding records like Mary J.’s “Real Love” and TLC’s “Baby-Baby-Baby”.
In hindsight, with all this backstory, one can understand why Bluesette was created. In a way, both Seiji and Hiromi seemingly wanted to create music that felt, if not part of its era, riding the curve forward. And to do so, they’d have to make that connection in Japan where they still had an opportunity to chase that dream. Together they came up with the name Bluesette, seemingly inspired by the late, great Quincy Jones’s take on the Toots Thielemans classic.
Two other names that would make Bluesette a reality would be Takayuki Ishida and Yasuyuki Kondo. It was they who went to Japanese label, Fun House, to give it a go and create a sublabel dedicated to Japanese artists creating music with a decidedly “un-Japanese” sensibility.
Fun House’s Illuminated J’s Sound compilation, released in 1994, revealed something everyone can see clearly now: Japan’s R&B scene needed cultivation. From artists that appeared on it like Cindy, Kiichi Yokoyama, and Chara, to those tirelessly creating outside of it like Toshinobu Kubota, Unisonair, and Tyrone Hashimoto (to name precious few), one thing united them: there was no Japanese equivalent to a Motown or Jive Records that they could sign to and simply be an R&B artist.
Illuminated J’s Sound II, revealed a year later, would show the strides Seiji, Hiromi, Takayuki, and Yasuyuki made to create that space. What would become Bluesette’s debut single, “Only You”, was revealed. Featured alongside other like-minded, more-contemporary-sounding J-R&B tracks, tracks that got inspiration not just from classic soul, but also from house, jungle, hard-nosed rap, and contemporary dance music, Bluesette felt like it was not part of the older scene but part of something new and more muscular. What Bluesette became part of was Fun House’s Rhythm Suite.
Promoted as the debut artist of the Rhythm Suite Series and Rhythm Suite record label, together with future artists like the soulful wild flower and funk-rock band Jango, they became, arguably, the first Japanese artist conceived and promoted to be a thoroughly R&B artist on a Japanese R&B label. One listen to “Only You” reveals just how ahead of the curve Bluesette turned out to be.
A bop, for lack of a better term, it had a certain heft and cutting edge mainstream Japanese pop and R&B-tinged music lacked then. Although the album was released in Japan in 1996, Bluesette (which you can stream here) exists as a New York City creation. Recorded at Axis Studios, Francois Kevorkian’s impressive studio situated above Studio 54, the duo did their best to enlist the help of a murderers’ row of storied Big Apple heavies, big names like Uncle Akbar, best known for his work with Madonna and Mariah Carey, and Herb Powers Jr., who worked with the King of Pop, Luther Vandross, and then later on future J-R&B heavies like Misia and Mondo Grosso. The rest of the musician mix were names like Jimmy Delgado, Dean Bailin, and others, who were integral to NYC’s contemporary dance and soul scene.
Songs like “Let Your Love Go” feature Seiji’s production steeped in hip-hop’s tasting notes and Hiromi’s impressive vocal arrangements that flow between sexy lyricism and hard-nosed phrasing. Other tracks like “Because Of You” and “Just For Tonight” have that floating adult sophistication, that “Frasurbane”, that other artists like Janet Jackson cultivated in the mid ’90s and Mariah’s Daydream experimented with.
Telling signs of the cutting edge Bluesette was honing were tracks like “Bluesette in the Jungle” — little skits that tipped their hat to an awareness of where music was heading. Their second single, an impressive remake of D-Train’s “You’re The One For Me” as “Make You Mine” (with equally impressive dance remixes), signaled another demarcation line. This was not your City Pop or Japanese artist who took cues from mainstream AOR or known soul acts, Bluesette’s influences were closer to those of a younger generation.
Another favorite of mine, “Mood For Love”, anticipates the themes of Wong Kar Wai’s film, by producing an equally suave and sultry scene, creating their own cool fusion of neo-soul and acid jazz (which excuses the lame bit of rapping). Another remake, that of Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real”, taps into evolutionary clues to their music. It’s difficult to listen to a track like “恋の行方 (That’s the Way Love Ends)” and not imagine Seiji’s hand on Utada Hikaru’s star-making “Movin’ On Without You”. I wager it was Hiromi who showed him how to write songs for J-baddies years earlier. Ditto for songs like “Summer Rain” and the strong-willed closer, “Make It Happen”.
So to end this review on a different note, one wonders why Bluesette’s debut became its sole release. No charts show any semblance of any single hit. And to this day, no reissues were ever made of it. Seiji would go on to work behind the scenes in the American and Japanese R&B world, while Hiromi (sadly) dropped off the music map. We can think of January 1997, when BMG Victor became BMG Japan, then in 1999 when Fun House was absorbed into it, as an inflection point. What started as a welcome risk to create a Japanese R&B label became just another loss and write-off, an experiment swept under the rug a year after it was created. Bluesette suffered in this merger.
However, I’d like to turn this around and think of something positive. By spotlighting a group like Bluesette we can give some joy to other artists searching for their place in whatever world they’re attempting to create. It goes on to another belief I have: although you won’t always be successful, it’s important to leave yourself a lasting memory. For now, I’m holding less tight to Bluesette’s work, hoping this is just another way we get it going to the right spaces and places.
