Elena Park Moon & Friends - Rabbit Days and Dumplings - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Ella Jenkins - Multicultural Children's Songs [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/17/1995

In the 1970s, Kazuki Tomokawa catapulted into Tokyo's avant-garde scene with his cathartic and utterly electrifying performances. Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa's second album, released in July 1976 by Harvest Records, finds the musician in his truest form as the Inchscreaming philosopherInch he would come to be called-cynical but fair, cheeky and melancholic, and looking at the world with truth-seeking eyes. In Straight from the Throat, Tomokawa shrieks and shouts and wallows with ritualistic abandon-his avant-folk stylings are cosmic and, at times, well to ground-shaking rock. He speaks of adolescence, passing hearses, and wedding chapel cars in a poem to his younger brother, Tomoharu, and watches ice melt on the Mitane River with spring's turn. Tomokawa's sound is, as Kiichi Takahara would later dub it, InchI-musicInch revelatory and deeply intimate songs that turn to the everyday and the interior. They are portraits of a man in search of meaning, who is taking stubborn control of his life by doing so. As he croons in InchThe Spring Is Here Again Song,Inch InchI'll drink till I've had my fill / And fall in love until I die.Inch

In celebration of Ella's 90th birthday on August 6th. Follow up to the best-selling Multicultural Songs children's album. Promoted to Folkways email (60K), Facebook (50K) and Twitter (11K) audience.