Tune up: Bill Wells, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats, Kama Aina and Kazumi Nikaidoh
A package tour including four of the top contemporary, independent Japanese acts performing with the Bill Wells Band...
Bill Wells' latest project presents a unique Japanese pop adventure. Wells, one of Scotland's most forward-looking musicians, joins four of Japan's leading acts on a TUNE UP tour that promises some of the freshest music and most invigorating performances you will experience all year.
Marrying ear-catching melodies with startling spontaneity and a massive range of influences with utterly personal inventiveness, this once in a lifetime package promises music that is at once easily accessible and daringly new.
Maher Shalal Hash Baz features husband and wife duo Tori and Reiko Kudo, a multi-instrumentalist and singer respectively whose music matches the translation of their name: be quick if you steal something. A virtuoso jazz pianist by training who has worked in settings from solo to orchestral, Tori Kudo performs his melodic songs in the moment, responding to everything from a cough to a thunderclap in the spirit of entertainment, as audiences at their previous British concerts will keenly attest. The duo's son, Namio, will join them on selected dates on laptop and percussion.
Also already familiar to UK audiences through his appearances at Triptych 2005, Takuji Aoyagi's one-man show, Kama Aina, combines mastery of the six-string banjo with highly individual live sampling and loops.
Making their UK debut in their own right, former colleagues of the Kudos, Saya and Takashi Ueno are Tenniscoats. Their psychedelic pop songs, sung to keyboards, saxophones and guitar accompaniments, are replete with both melodic hooks and fearless exploration and complemented BMX Bandits on a recent Japanese tour.
Kazumi Nikaido is another UK debutante, a singer-songwriter of astonishing vocal range and extraordinary depth whose work has been reviewed enthusiastically by leading music magazine The Wire.
The tour came about as a result of Wells' two months-long sojourn in Japan in 2004 which included a ten-concert tour and produced two CDs, the first of which, Osaka Bridge, is released imminently on the Karaoke Kalk label. Wells, whose growing international reputation includes a recent tour with Swedish pop sensation Jens Lekman, will feature in a special final set with the Japanese musicians following short individual sets by each act.
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