This is unusual but I like it!

You know, this Japanese Band is really unusual to you guys, but I am excited to introduce to you...

The group is called "Minyo Crusaders"

"Minyo" in Japanese means traditional folk song/s. They revive and interprete "Minyo" in a modern way mixing Jazz, Afro Beat, Cumbia and Afro Cuban. The leader Katsuumi Tanaka, a guitarist was playing at the US base in Yokota Japan. He met a Minyo singer Freddie Tsukamoto at a local bar in 2012. They started digging an idea of fusing Minyo and Jazz, Afro Cuban and the rest.

January 17th 2021, they were invited to perform at the famous Tiny Desk, NPR channel! The venue was somewhere near the Yokota US base I guess...

I love their sense of arranging and mixing traditional Japanese folk songs with the other styles of music. Watch the 3rd song especially, in their performance at Youtube, called "Aizubndaisan". There, they put some phrase of the Jazz classic, "Caravan" in a beautiful way.

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13 Comments

          1. Am sure you will love it, great food, great music and amazing people… You won’t be disappointed 😊

  1. I could certainly enjoy listening to them live…in a club environment with the atmosphere they’d generate, but probably not something I’d listen to alone.

    ….oh and on the terminology, is it really ‘fork’ or as we would say ‘folk’ 😉

  2. Nice band, working well together 😉. I like the way Caravan finds its way into the last track! Thanks for posting Takashi.

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