Here’s another album I’ve been holding off forever, waiting just for the right time of the year to share it. Kyoko Furuya’s 冷たい水 (otherwise known as Cool Water) embodies everything that was intriguing about the influential Japanese label Better Days’ short-lived existence. Kyoko Furuya’s 冷たい水 features a kaleidoscopic vision of what Japanese Pop can be when it ties its influence to something like reggae, funk, R&B, and disco. This is something you might not appreciate if you simply ran across the Chee Shimizu-approved “晴海埠頭”. What gets you about 冷たい水 is how surprisingly personal and vast it is.
Kyoko Furuya began her career as a piano student in Tokyo’s Kunitachi College of Music. Equal parts in love with the music of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Roberta Flack, as soon as she graduated from college in the late ‘70s she attempted to pursue a music career as a singer-songwriter. Debuting in a duo dubbed Virgo with future actress Yumi Mizusawa, they quietly became a popular thing in the acoustic Tokyo folk scene. With time, though, Kyoko Furuya pursued other opportunities.
Her biggest turn came to be to serve as pianist and synthesizer player for influential Japanese folk singer-songwriter Tomokawa Kazuki. Eventually, though, it appeared Kyoko caught a concert from King Creole and the Coconuts and everything seemed to shift for her, creatively. Smitten by this vision of a pan-global groove music, Kyoko signed with avant-garde label Better Days to create something approaching the middle-ground between her earlier personal folk-rock influence and this new tropical world she was open to. Luckily for Kyoko, Better Days had a roster of musicians more than ready to tread some new Japanese ground.
Primarily working with hugely experimental percussionist Shuichi “Ponta” Murakami, Kyoko took his wordly drumming knowledge and attempted to cross many bridges. Enlisting the help of Tamio “Doyo” Kawabata also from Colored Music (on bass) and Pecker, another master drummer who was just a year removed from his pioneering reggae masterpiece Power, 冷たい水 tried to speak of a Japan that was still uncertain and create music that sure sounded like it could gain power from acknowledging it. Colored Music itself wandered in this murky funky water, here it gains a different traction.
“晴海埠頭” (or Harumi Futoh) as it’s most commonly known, opens the album on a deep note. A lively track, it approximates reggae without spacey-ness and distance, but with tons more darker atmosphere hastened by its minimal, and quite heavy, production. You wouldn’t be wrong to think of this as close kin to Gil Scott-Heron’s “message” albums with Brian Jackson (think “Angel Dust” from Secrets). The album gets even more intriguing as Kyoko shifts on the next track “どこ” to wrap what sounds a singer-songwriter torch ballad into something approaching, and lapping into a dub workout with Kyoko’s brilliant piano work zig-zagging like the best reggae masters. It’s something that reimagines Pecker’s touch in a way that is personal in a different way, in plead that needs no vocabulary to (quietly) understand.
Then, just when you’re led to believe by “シューラ・ブーラ” that this whole album is going to be a meditative soul burner, “One Season だけの恋” introduces to the other side of Kyoko. “One Season だけの恋” mines the work of Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band to create something approximating the delightful off-beat funk of that big-screen big band jazz outfit. Wonderful disco anyone can appreciate, is certainly a surprise. Favorite bit: when Shuichi starts scatting over the spaced out piano bits ending the song (which seem to be on vacation from some lost Twinkle Brothers record).
For those who needed an evolution of that Colored Music sound, the capper closing the A-side, “メモリー”, takes a pulsating bass line into a journey with all sorts of dissonant soul music, only this motley crew can create.
Things don’t tone down on the B-side, “東京” remains this gorgeous gem of dark reggae music that, once heard, is impossible to forget, and also serving as a furthering of the opening track, “東京” transforms a minimal groove into something explosive, into something quietly slinky and threatening as Kyoko’s bubbling synths approach the water drop sounds as something more than just mere background scenery. “ケサラン・パサラン” then brings you back with a latin-tinged foxtrot that wouldn’t sound out of place in a wonderfully deep Salsoul album. “０時のメイン・ストリート”, somehow meets Yumi Murata’s idea of psychedelic funk on it’s own level, by letting Kyoko adopt a deeper intonation where her plea to “Let It Swing” burns you on a deeper level (as the drum and bass lines dig even further).
The album ends on two final tracks that seemingly couldn’t be further from each other. On the album’s longest cut: “デジャヴ” what sounds like progressive Pop turns out to explode into an experimental dub tango that truly benefits from its long wingspan. Kyoko’s vocal scales run from whisper to scream and everything in between in this epic track. The album ends on a gorgeous note, one perhaps closer (in spirit) to her earlier influences. “きっとそうね”, vacillates between Philly soul and gorgeous baroque folk. Minnie Riperton once did this masterfully in Come To My Garden, and I dare say (wherever Minnie is) there’s a welcome hat tip and nod to Kyoko waiting from her for this one. Singles were cut of this gorgeous song (with a flip side of “メモリー” but much like many things Japanese, few outside the jazz world, would be able to hear this album. Here’s hoping, with time, we get to hear more from Kyoko.