ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

Funk on da Table

by Michael Tisserand

When the future arrived for June Yamagishi, it appeared as a recording of Japanese pop star Chiemi Eri singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” Yamagishi grew up in the city of Ise in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Ise, a coastal city on the tip of Kii Peninsula, is home to the most sacred Shinto shrine in the country. It’s also known for the prized Ise lobster, which is served in a variety of ways, including in ice cream. But what Ise didn’t have during Yamagishi’s childhood in the mid-1950s was live music clubs. His aunt’s record albums, Yamagishi says, “were the first encounter with music in my life.” These also included the Japanese version of the Fats Domino classic “My Blue Heaven” that was a national hit for the singing comedian Ken’ichi Enomoto. Yamagishi also grew up hearing a popular Japanese version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” By the time he was 10 or 11, he’d heard enough to inspire him to pick up his first electric guitar. “I fell in love with its sound and the look of it,” he says, and soon he was working out Beatles and Ventures tunes. By the early 1970s, Yamagishi was gigging nightly in Kyoto and playing in one of Japan’s first blues combos. It’s tempting to regard the title of Yamagishi’s first solo recording during this time — “Really?!” — as his response to anyone doubting that a musician from Japan could play the blues so well. But spend any time with Yamagishi, and it quickly becomes clear that such a confrontation wouldn’t be Yamagishi’s style. “Music is music,” he’s fond of saying, before letting his guitar carry on the rest of the conversation. Yamagishi was in his early 20s when he first toured the United States, and he later came to NewOrleans, he would tell Japan Times magazine, because he wanted to see the Mardi Gras Indians. Music critic John Swenson wrote of the journey: “His move to New Orleans in search of a higher level of musical enlightenment was something like British guitarist Eric Clapton’s decision, at the high point of his popularity with the supergroups Cream and Blind Faith, to become a sideman in the American blues and R&B band of Delaney and Bonnie.”

Japanese guitarist June Yamagishi at Jazz Fest photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee

guitarists. Musicians from Dr. John to George Porter, Jr., to Erica Falls have wanted Yamagishi at their sides. The Japanese guitarist attracted to New Orleans to hear the Mardi Gras Indian would become a member of The Wild Magnolias’ band. But it was a late-night meeting at the Maple Leaf Bar with New Orleans native John Gros that would lead to one of Yamagishi’s most enduring friendships, deepening the musical alliance between Japan and New Orleans in unexpected ways. By this time, Gros had earned his own reputation as a top New Orleans funk and rhythm & blues keyboardist, including as a member of George Porter, Jr.’s band, and was looking to start a regular jam session. Out of this desire came the long-running band Papa Grows Funk, with Yamagishi front and center. It started with two musicians from worlds apart, speaking English in different accents and working very hard to understand each other. Says Gros: “My first impression was, ‘He’s kind of wild-looking but man can he play guitar!’ I remember thinking that he was pretty cool and easy to talk to once I could figure out what he was saying.” From there, a tight musical kinship quickly formed. “June is of the moment,” Gros says. “Don’t ask him about yesterday; he’ll tell you, ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ Don’t ask him about tomorrow: ‘Well, I don’t know, can you ask me tomorrow?’ But when I see him he’s excited to see me like the first time I met him in 2000. “He processes life through his feelings. If you ask him for his opinion, he doesn’t say, ‘I think,’ he says, ‘I feel this way or that way.’ His playing is exactly the same. It’s alive. He will never play anything the same way twice. He is constantly evolving and wants to know how you are evolving. So when we play together the goal is to see how our life journeys cross paths on the stage.” Growing up in New Orleans, Gros admits, his primary exposure to Japanese life and culture was identifying Japan as the home of the bad guys in movies and television shows like Baa Baa Black

“June is of the moment,” Gros says. “Don’t ask him about yesterday; he’ll tell you, ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ Don’t ask him about tomorrow: ‘Well, I don’t know, can you ask me tomorrow?’ But when I see him he’s excited to see me like the first time I met him in 2000."

Yamagishi doesn’t put his arrival in New Orleans in terms of musical enlightenment, however. “Wow, this is it,” is what he remembered thinking. In NewOrleans, Yamagishi quickly became a fixture on late-night stages in local clubs such as the Maple Leaf Bar, Tipitina’s and the Old Point Bar in Algiers Point. There, often draped in a large tie-dye shirt, he’d hunch over his guitar to lay down funk rhythms and then, his long black hair either loosely tied back in a ponytail or freely falling around his head, he’d lean back to break into the kinds of solos that have earned him acclaim as one of the city’s top funk

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JULY•AUGUST 2019

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