"I've learned other people's stories, told my own stories through song..."

If you haven't heard of Yoko Kanno, I think it's time to get acquainted. She is quickly becoming one of my favorite composers and maestrae ... and that's saying a lot. Maybe it's because she has an extensive (and amazing) repertoire of instrumental and vocal works. Maybe it's because she's an awesome pianist (and I always look up to great pianists) ...

... Or maybe it's just because I can't get over a 40-year-old Japanese woman writing some of the greatest old-school jazz I've heard in a long time.

She actually writes in a ton of genres other than jazz ... and for a ton of people. In fact, somebody at Wikipedia who knows a lot more about Yoko Kanno than I do says she's worked on 27 anime series, eight films, and nine video games.

And that doesn't mean she's written a song for 27 animes, eight films, and nine video games. For the majority of those, she's written entire scores. For many of the animes, she's scored the entire series. In addition, she's written for a ton of J-Pop artists (including some she sings herself under a pseudonym).

Ugh. I feel like that line from Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer": "You're talkin' a lot/but you're not sayin' anything." ::grins:: I mean, it's hard to talk about music without hearing it, you know?

Fortunately for me, the YK Project has audio clips from a lot of her works available for download. Recognize this song? It's from Cowboy Bebop. Hard to miss if you surf over to Cartoon Network on Saturday nights.

She's hard to catch in the U.S. these days. Every once in a while, she'll pop over for a anime convention or a concert, but it's pretty rare to see her conducting or performing here. Bummer. You can pick up her CDs from Amazon. Most of them are fairly expensive because they're imports (think $25-$50 per CD). BUT you can get cheap copies (~$8-$10) through Amazon's partner program.

I hadn't intended to spend an entire post talking music, but hey, this is really good stuff. ^_^

P.S. The quote in the title is from this interview, which is actually pretty decent. I think all musicians can appreciate the idea of music as a universal language. Unfortunately, I can't read most of her other interviews because they're in Japanese. And that's too bad, because I was really interested in the one titled "How do you do? I am a dog."