Japanese Traditional Music: Songs of People at Work and Play

This album is the fifth volume in an anthology of traditional Japanese music, created in 1941 by the Kokusai Bunka Shinko-kai (KBS) International Organization for the Promotion of Culture. Painstakingly restored and recompiled from the original discs, each volume of the collection represents a genre of traditional music, with this CD focusing on minyo (folk or local songs). Recorded between the late 1930s and 1940, each of the 24 tracks that make up this album provides a fascinating glimpse into a Japan that was to slowly vanish throughout the remainder of the 20th century. Sung to accompany rice farming, wheat threshing and other forms of work – practices that began to decline during the economic prosperity of the 60s – these were later performed at regional festivals and banquets. The crackles from the 40s recording technology adds to these recordings’ sense of fragility and transience.

The first half of the album is largely vocal-centric, with unaccompanied voices breaking into soaring melismas, and joyful call-and-response patterns that form complex repeating forms. The latter half of the album, which features songs of boatmen, pleasure districts and bon festivals, introduces accompaniment by shamisen (in a style that would later evolve into the highly popular tsugaru shamisen genre), shinobue (flute), taiko (drum) and the rare kokyu (fiddle). The liner notes provide excellent background context to what is an essential documentation of Japan's disappearing folk culture.