by Andreas Stuhlmann
After his Beams Records releases, “Glam! Exotica” and “Mondo Erotica,”
Jun Miyake presents his musical thoughts on the theme of innocence
in this third work in twelve months. The title might suggest filing
this one somewhere in the easy-listening drawer — maybe even next
to Lisa Ono and consorts — and classifying it as light and fluffy
BGM for your summer garden party. On the other hand, those who
have lent the above mentioned albums an ear, won’t be too surprised
to find “Innocent Bossa” being traded with December’s new releases
as rather serious art. In his very own way of combining technical
conservatism with spiritual avantgardism, composer and musician
Miyake digs deep into the material, and with his dream partner
for this project, guitar maltraiteur, original Lounge Lizard and
Ambitious Lover Arto Lindsay, and the help of guests including
Vinicius Cantuaria, Peter Scherer (the other Ambitious Lover)
and others, the Berkeley graduate delivers another gorgeous high-class
crossover product. Almost every one of the ten tracks on “Innocent
Bossa” starts just as you would expect from a bossa nova album:
acoustic guitar, Latin percussion instrumentals, and Brazilian
vocals courtesy of Cantuaria, Lindsay, or Zeno Ishida. But with
Miyake’s distorted Fender Rhodes, piano or flugelhorn sounds and
samples thrown in, the bossa slowly winds its way up to more psychedelic
spheres and makes the album a listening adventure that approaches
bossa nova from the jazz side and vice versa, and tries out decent
dub or breakbeat rhythms. Quite the opposite of background music.
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