The Producer: Yuki Kajiura (Part II)
(If you missed Part I, here it is.)
Is it serendipity? In Part II of his excellent ongoing series on the role of producers in music, Anthony Overs asked why there are so few women on the production side of the business.
At about the same time, I posted Part I of my two-part series on Yuki Kajiura, one of Japan’s most important producers. She is also a prolific composer and an accomplished instrumentalist.
Without getting too deep into the politics of sexism in the music industry, I find it fascinating that the best country for women who want to break the rules in the music biz is not the “woke” U.S.A., but the supposedly medieval, patriarchal Japan.
In Japan, many music styles that we consider stereotypically masculine, like hard rock, heavy metal, and jazz, are dominated by women.
Production and technical stuff are starting to follow suit. Show-Ya, the all-female heavy metal band founded in 1981, produce the longest-running rock festival in Japan. Kajiura herself originally studied engineering in school and gets involved in mixing and mastering her performances. If you like seeing women break ceilings, the music biz in Japan is an exciting place right now.
Kajiura writes unabashedly emotional songs, again, just as women are expected to do. However, her compositions are complex and technically demanding — characteristics historically stereotyped as “male.” Most unusually, while many of her songs have beautiful, affecting lyrics, they do not lean on the lyrics for their emotional impact. She uses human voices the way a painter uses colors.
And what voices! Kajiura clearly has a particular set of characteristics she looks for in a voice — power, sweetness, and bell-like clarity all in one. She is uncompromising about what she is looking for. Twelve years ago, to fill an open spot in her vocal trio Kalafina, she and her team screened 37,000 applicants!
Her ensembles usually include singers with staggered, overlapping registers, enabling them to create rich harmonies that sound like much larger ensembles. To my ear, listening to their live performances is akin to hearing ballads and pop songs performed by choirs of angels.
Kajiura is best known for her dozens of movie scores and TV-series theme songs. Rather than leave it to others to interpret her compositions, she records the soundtracks herself, with teams of hand-picked musicians with whom she has worked for years. Those ensembles, or “projects,” often take on a life of their own. Collectively, they have released almost 60 albums, numerous singles, EPs, music videos, and embedded soundtracks.
For Part II of my series on Kajiura, I jump back in time to around ten years before the “Reprise” sessions I posted in Part I. Most of the characters are the same but a decade younger. (Wakana Ootaki, featured here, was replaced by Joelle before the “Reprise” recordings.)
Personnel:
Yuki Kajiura composer, piano/keyboards; Wakana Ootaki (Soprano); Yuriko Kaida (Soprano); Keiko Kubota (Contralto); Kaori Oda (Mezzo Soprano); Koichi Korenaga (guitars); Hitoshi Konno (violin); Kyoichi Sato (drums); Tomoharu “Jr” Takahashi (bass guitar); Yoshio Ohira (percussion and sound engineer)
“In the Land of Twilight, Under the Moon” (live, 2011)
This is particularly interesting because Kajiura uses polyphonic harmonies throughout. Polyphony was common in Western Renaissance music but is almost never used in modern songwriting. A “round” such as “Row, row, row your boat” is an extremely simple kind of polyphony.
Listen also for some wonderful playing by the instrumentalists.
“Houseki 宝石 中文字幕” (live, 2015)
Kajiura often writes songs to feature one or another of the vocalists in the lead role. This one features Keiko Kubota. I chose it because Kubota has a remarkable range from contralto up to mezzo-soprano. In vocal ensembles with multiple registers, the lower registers usually support the higher voices.
However, Kubota’s power and resonance give Kajiura the luxury of being able to write lead roles for her. She has been the long-time anchor of both FictionJunction and of Kalafina, another of Kajiura’s vocal ensembles.
Shout-outs to Alexander Razin; David Acaster; Miss Catherine La Grange, spinster; Jessica Lee McMillan; Zarla Dawn; Jeffrey Harvey; Alex Markham; Dan Reich; Charlie Cole; Elizabeth Kaldeck Smith; Nicole Brown; Madeline Dovi; Steve Goldberg; Stephanie Leguichard; Giulia Picciau; Drew Wardle; Laura Lind; Christine Carmichael; Jon Scarborough; Anthony Overs; Buddy Gott; If Ever You’re Listening; Troy Larson; Steven Hale. And thank you, Kevin Alexander, for always proofreading and publishing!
