Hippu-hoppu: Japanese doing the Double Dutch

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I caught a cool video story today on NYT.com, about a Double Dutch competition held in Harlem. (You may have to do a search for it once you get to the NYT video page).

Interestingly, the competitive African American tradition, which counts the number of times you can jump rope in two minutes and then add on layers of amazing acrobatic performances, has become a focus of Japanese youth who are fascinated with black culture. The NYT story points out that Japanese teams have won “Best of Show” in this competition eight out of the past 10 years, and sure enough, a team from Chiba, the city northeast of Tokyo, won this event.

Another manifestation of this cross-cultural fascination are the young Japanese women who dress in retro-funky ’70s black styles, who are called “ganguro” — “gang girls.”

The Japanese dining cops are coming

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The Washington Post recently reported that the government of Japan is going to start checking out Japanese restaurants all over the world and handing out seals of approvals for those deemed to be serving “authentic” Japanese cuisine.

This rather extreme step (it sounds like something the snooty French would do) is the result of a recent visit by the country’s Minister of Agriculture, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who went to a Japanese restaurant in Colorado and saw that the menu also featured Korean barbecued beef. Continue reading →

“Love” is one you need: The Beatles reconsidered in a mashup

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It took the urging of Cirque du Soleil, the acrobatic dance performance group, to bring the music of the Beatles – the most iconic of 1960s baby boomer musical catalogs — into the 21st century.

The bulk of the project is a mashup, the digital-era, technology-enabled ability of taking two different kinds of data and “mashing” them together to make something new. Mashups can be a newsworthy online database of crime statistics overlaid onto a Google map, for instance, or it can be cool cultural commentary, like overdubbing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” onto the Destiny’s Child hit, “Bootylicious” (they fit so perfectly, it’s spooky).

Or, mashups can be the melding of two generations of music, like producer Danger Mouse’s weaving of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with the Beatles’ own “White Album.”

This time, though, the work of reconstructing and reassembling the Beatles’ recordings was a sanctioned deal. Continue reading →

Amos Lee: a songwriter for a new generation

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The title of Amos Lee’s second album, “Supply and Demand,” might be a jab at the commercial realities of the music biz… or it might be an embrace of them. The Philly-born singer-songwriter found a folk-pop groove on his self-titled debut that hit the sweet spot and reached #2 on the Billboard “Heatseekers” chart and got a track on a couple of TV shows, including the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

That debut was produced by Norah Jones Band bassist Lee Alexander and featured Jones, who had hired Lee as her opening act on tour, on several tracks. This time out, singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant is at the production helm, but the production is low-key and unobstrusive. Continue reading →

“Ray Sings, Basie Swings” is a ghostly concept album

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It’s a somewhat goulish idea: take a recording of a late, great artist, and shore it up with new backing tracks. It’s been done before, with Natalie Cole’s “duet” with her father, and the remaining Beatles backing a newly-discovered John Lennon solo track. And if you wanna look at it from a contemporary perspective, digital “mashups” that overlay, for instance, Nirvana with Destiny’s Child accomplish the same idea with spooky success.

On “Ray Sings, Basie Swings,” the legendary vocalist is paired up via technology to the current and living version of the Count Basie Orchestra, and the result is a brassy, sassy and sometimes strange album from the grave. Continue reading →