Stop me if I’ve said this before: we all know when we’ve landed on our chosen instrument. Right now, as I’m listening to a certain someone’s skronking saxophone playing over my headphones, I can’t help but think it’s true. Finding your true self isn’t always some linear path. No, it’s falling in the mode of your swingin’ moods, as evidenced in Yukarie’s Love.sea.
Born in Tokyo as Yukari Tsukakoshi, Yukarie’s first instrument was piano. A prodigious talent, it wasn’t until Yukarie teamed up with friends Miwako Saito, Junko Koresawa, Kaoru Sakaguchi, and Mikiko Ishida to form the pioneering all-female pop group Tango Europe that she’d take her first step into the wild world of music.
As Tango Europe’s keyboardist, she was known for her performances bopping around on various synths behind the rest of the band. In that heady bubble era, her early musical influences — that of YMO, The Bangles, and New Wave — were what moved her music. After Tango Europe’s 1983 debut album, 乙女の純情 (Otome no Junjo), Yukari began to transition further into the forefront, adding more vocals and integrating her saxophone playing into their sophomore release, 1984’s フラストレーション (Furasutoreeshon). What once was a promising start, one full of Hosono-penned and Seiji Toda- or Akira Inoue-arranged songs, led to Tango Europe’s dissolution.
By the mid ’80s, Yukari’s muse went elsewhere. Switching fully to tenor saxophone, she became a session musician, performing on stage or in sessions for groups like Katsuya Kobayashi & the No.1 Band, until she landed in the strange but welcoming arms of visionary Japanese punk band Jagatara. First appearing on Jagatara’s sprawling 1987 release, にせ予言者ども (False Prophets), Yukari’s on-stage performances and backup vocals added a distinct No Wave and mutant sax flavor to Jagatara’s own transformation into that stylistically freer band they became.
Eventually, right before Jagatara’s dissolution, one could sense that Yukari was rumbling to stretch out further. In 1990, she’d help start a sprawling, horn-heavy, jazz-funk cum rock’n’roll big band with members of Mute Beat, Chocolat, and Jagatara, which they’d dub The Thrill. By far her longest and current tenure, it was The Thrill that gave her an outlet to explore the more experimental side of her influences and brought her to the forefront as frontwoman and bandleader.
Although for many Japanese listeners The Thrill, or perhaps her radio shows, are what Yukarie remains most known for, I happen to think her little-heard or appreciated solo pop career is what sticks with me the most. And it all just started with 1995’s Yukarie.
Signed to Eastworld, Yukari’s self-titled debut with an “e” finds her going back to a time when her dreams were more overground and less esoteric. In between her more experimental sound and an exploration of contemporary alt-pop music, Yukarie split the difference on songs like “Stop That Interview,” “Baby Love” (its lead single), and “Yellow Moon,” creating music that smoothed out some of her edges in a play for radio and a pop career.
Featuring more of a live-session crew than what came afterward, musicians like Urban Dance’s Shinobu Narita, YMO’s Kenji Omura, and more outre performers like Koji Takimoto gave the album a loose, searching sound. Yukarie’s best tracks, in the middle of the album, like “裸足の人形” (Hadashi no Ningyo), “Interview,” and especially “ふしぎ…” (Fushigi…), have this quasi-psychedelic, not-quite-trip-hop feel. The end track, “永遠の余韻” (Eien no Yoin), went even further, treating us to Yukarie’s tenor sax in an ambient music environment, approximating a closer sound to that of one Yasuaki Shimizu, an early influence she namechecks in the album’s liner notes.
What I find even more special and fascinating about her sophomore solo release, 1997’s Love.sea, is just how much further it moves along to front Yukarie’s obvious talent. Although less stylistically panoramic than her debut, its exploration of more contemporary dance and pop gave Yukarie a platform to really present a true evolution in her music.
Largely recorded with a mix of dance producers, remixers, and programmers, Love.sea‘s lead single, “Sugar Sugar,” didn’t really capture the shifty sound Yukarie’s album really had. The lead track, “Release The Beast,” played it perfectly. Far more mature and sexier in sound than anything in her past, new genre explorations in acid jazz, big beat, or trip-hop gave Yukarie free rein to bring her impressive sax playing back to the forefront, in a way that suited her more “adult” voice.
Released during a time when Japan was going through its own wave of UK-inspired music, songs like “Phat 32.7” felt part of the vanguard of their time, showing ways Japanese artists could mix their own ideas on jungle, acid techno, and whatever else into their pop music. Of course, tracks like my favorite, “Still Miss You Babe <Pedulla-Mix>,” capture a sound that’s still wonderfully contemporary.
Under the influence of groups like Portishead, Massive Attack, and Sneaker Pimps, groups with a long tail of jazz, hip-hop, and dub in their sound, Yukarie’s own take with Jagatara’s Ebby (and Killing Time’s Mecken on bass) was equally impressive. Clocking in at over seven minutes, “Still Miss You Babe <Pedulla-Mix>” captured the slippery, grimy, intoxicating allure of downtempo music, creating atmospheric grooves that barely bubbled over, meeting Yukarie’s lovelorn vocals and sax. The first interlude underlines the provocative mix of pop and alternative Yukarie was going for.
The live version of “Sugar Sugar,” recorded at Seventh Heaven, Japan’s oldest “gentlemen’s club,” didn’t hold back — something else was on Yukarie’s mind. Mute Beat’s Hirofumi Asamoto would lend his hand on Yukarie’s “Some Like It Hot,” another impressive trip-hop pop song that flips from its slightly coquettish beginnings to something a bit sleazier and more sinister, matching the mood of the music to its message. The versioned “Some Like It Hot” as “Some Like It Hot <Very Special Love>” then uses jungle/drum’n’bass to cement its more pertinent beats into a “hotter” song with a different “swing and sway.” My mind still boggles that Yukarie attempted all of this in what was supposed to be her pop outlet.
At the end of the day, when I listen to Love.sea‘s final track, a bonus remix of “Still Miss You Babe” as “Still Miss You Babe <Deeper To Get>,” I sort of understand why Yukarie didn’t run away from all her ideas and experimentation. Sometimes you get “sick’n tired of speaking.” Sometimes you get “sick’n tired of wandering,” of “wanting.” Sometimes all you need is to hold closer to those and what you love, to bottle what makes you, you. When I listen to Love.sea climaxing at the end via Yukarie’s careening saxophone, multiplying, folding in and out, while her vocals hold their own in moments of musical maelstrom, I can’t help but think this was when her musical synapses were firing red hot, a love supreme.
