[acid-jazz] [Fwd: [soundlounge] Interview :: Coldfeet/The Japan Times]

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Date: Tue Nov 26 2002 - 21:29:15 CET

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    Interview :: Coldfeet/The Japan Times

    Interview :: Coldfeet/The Japan Times

    source: The Japan Times
    Coldfeet raise pop to a higher plane

    By ROLAND KELTS
    Special to The Japan Times

    "Sure, we want to be famous," Coldfeet's chanteuse, Lori Fine, says a
    little defensively in the faux tavern environs of Shibuya's TGIFridays,
    stabbing at a half-eaten pizza quesadilla. Fine is a former model and
    has the effortless poise and posture of one -- minus the myopic egotism.

                                     [Image]

         Coldfeet's Lori Fine and Atsushi "Watusi" Tsunoda are shaking
         off preprogrammed studio sounds with artful melodies and
         teasing lyrics.

    Fiery, slinky and seductive onstage and on record, her offstage persona
    is disarmingly simple and humble. She takes a sip of her favorite
    beverage: lukewarm water.

    "But we really want to mix things up, jazz and pop, house and hip hop,
    East and West, male and female. We're not willing to be authorial about
    marketing. Even if sometimes," she admits, flashing wide, Audrey Hepburn

    eyes, "there's a conflict."

    Musical duo Coldfeet may be the odd couple of Tokyo's pop scene. While
    so many of this city's performers are self-conscious imitators with lots

    of color, pseudo-punk stances and hip-hop romps (but little depth),
    Coldfeet tap into more archetypal pleasures: artful melodies, a teasing
    lyric, a finely tuned phrase or riff. More urbane than urban.

    Fine is the daughter of a Jewish-American clinical psychologist from New

    York and a Japanese mother, and was raised on dad's jazz records and
    mom's koto-playing in rural Oregon. The producer, bassist and musical
    polymath is Japanese Atsushi Tsunoda, or "Watusi" as he calls himself
    (after the African-inspired '60s dance craze). He was raised in rural
    Gunma Prefecture.

    They've been making CDs and performing club dates in Tokyo for five
    years, evoking what few other of the city's otherwise progressive pop
    practitioners seem to care about: sophistication.

    After several nationwide tours, David Lynch-style videos on MTV Japan
    and Europe, a Top 10 single, "In My Lucid Dream," and major label
    support from Sony Japan, Coldfeet are now reaching back to Fine's
    homeland across the Pacific. This spring they signed with Mick Inagawa,
    a veteran music biz impresario who spent 10 years in New York and helped

    sell DJ Krush.

    They're blanketing the lucrative U.S. AOR market with demo CDs this
    fall, and they're planning to play Austin, Texas' South-by-Southwest
    festival and the newly anointed Tokyo-New York festival in Manhattan,
    both next spring. Their new CD, "JazzFeet," due out in two months, will
    be split between original Afro-Cuban-inspired songs and jazz standards.
    One single is a spirited, bilingual rendering of Rosemary Clooney's
    "Come On A' My House," a tribute to the late singer, who died in June.

    Coldfeet may not be authorial about marketing, but they are starting to
    get aggressive.

    "We want to focus on the live show now," a clearly exhilarated Watusi
    tells me as we drive the sterile streets of Tokyo's western suburbs well

    after midnight. Hours earlier, at the end of the duo's three-night
    engagement this summer at the swank Yokohama Blue Note, a packed room of

    20-year-olds sat entranced, bobbing their heads and grinning to the
    infectious rhythms.

    Backed by horns, percussion and vibes, Fine and Watusi stirred the kind
    of heat you expect from a rock show. The Japanese kids, with one table
    of energetic gaijin, took it in enthusiastically. Fine sang her
    hyped-up, rhythmically forceful "Come On A' My House," switching into
    Japanese for the verses, and the place was screaming for more.

    Coldfeet rock up their jazz, and they're best when strong. "We want more

    spontaneity, more energy," Watusi continues, referring to his
    preprogrammed studio sounds that hamper live improvisation. Another
    conflict: How to create aurally complex tracks in the studio that can
    come alive extemporaneously onstage.

    Some songs sound like a jazzier, wittier Everything But the Girl; others

    blend scat rhythms and discordant horns with gender-bending lyrics:
    "Woman be a man for me/Hold your baby tight/Woman be a man for me/Show
    me how it's done tonight." The interplay of conflicting musical and
    sexual identities seems an accurate portrait of today's confused Tokyo.

    Fine's life in Japan has been schizophrenic. Hired as a model, then as a

    lead actress in "Hide to Rosanna Ai No Kiseki (Hide and Rosanna Love
    Miracle)," a TV drama about a real-life Japanese male and Italian female

    singing duo that won nationwide attention, the suddenly sought-after
    gaijin stubbornly stuck to music over acting. "It was fun," she says now

    of her television stardom, "but I only wanted to make music. When I
    heard Watusi's work, I knew we'd make the right pair."

    In 1996, Watusi was a part of drum 'n' bass pioneers Mushroom Head. He
    was also producing and making commercial jingles for just about everyone

    who could book him. He wanted out.

    "Lori sent me back a demo tape of a song I sent her. She was just
    scatting 'cold feet, cold feet,' I loved it. Her voice and humor were
    perfect," says Watusi. Lori was working with another musical partner,
    but she felt electrified by Watusi's musical vocabulary, which draws
    upon the soft and hard ends of the funk-jazz-pop spectrum -- Sade and
    Grace Jones.

    Sony sent the duo to Morocco last winter to shoot some videos ("We got
    so many good vibes," Watusi says). They returned to Tokyo and recorded a

    brilliantly diverse set of songs that Sony refused to release overseas,
    owing to contractual conflicts. The duo left Sony during another
    corporate ristura (restructuring). Like so much in Japan, Sony Japan is
    Sony Japan, internationalism be damned.

    With America now beckoning, I ask them if they'd leave their Tokyo
    haunts for the lure of fame overseas. They shake their heads. "Tokyo's
    focused on the underground," Watusi says. "You can get exactly what you
    want here, because the mainstream is not so loud. The offbeat is for
    everyone."

    Lori Fine will tour as vocalist with Sugizo & The Spank Your Juice.
    Coldfeet tracks will be covered. For tour information, check out
    www.sugizo.com

    The Japan Times: Oct. 27, 2002

    --
    ECLECTIC Japan
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