Hikari Ichihara “Dear Gatsby”
Hikari Ichihara “Dear Gatsby” (Pony Canyon 2014)
Hikari Ichihara – trumpet
Jun Miyakawa – piano, Rhodes, synthesizer
Akiyoshi Shimizu – bass
Kazuaki Yokoyama – drums
David Negrete – reading
Concept albums run the risk of the concept deflating or the music becoming subservient or contrived. Hikari Ichihara’s concept album, “Dear Gatsby,” though avoids those pitfalls and delivers eleven stunning tracks of modern jazz devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel “The Great Gatsby.” It’s too bad the recent film remake adaptation of the novel didn’t hire Ichihara and band to do the soundtrack. If they had, they would have had amazing music from Ichihara and band that gets to the heart of the novel without losing its jazz heart.
Clearly, Ichihara is a fan of the novel, swept up by its lyricism, honesty and romance, all of which flow into the songs. With six originals of her own, three from the band, and readings in English from the novel woven into the songs, the narrative flow of the album works marvelously. The quotes she chooses as inspiration for each track (nicely laid out in both English and Japanese in the CD’s booklet) follow the novel’s progress, and serve as both frame and engine to let each tune tell its story.
One imagines Ichihara handing out the novel to all the band members as homework and demanding they get to know the story intimately. They very much do. She must have had in mind this project of turning the novel into a jazz suite since first reading the novel in college or high school. It is certainly well conceived and well delivered, but without being carefully planned so much as deeply felt.
The first two tunes, “You Must Know Gatsby” and “Old Sport,” pile on the optimism, as does the beginning of the novel, but with a sense of the tragic ending to come woven in to the melody and solos. The songs reflect musically the complexities of the novel’s symbolic elements. “Did You See the Green Light” expresses the sadness of staring off at the symbol of one’s unreachable desire. “Can You Repeat the Past?” is as much reflection on the love of jazz as the love of a long-lost lover.
When Daisy enters the story, “Waltz for Ms. Baker” brings in all the fragility, confusion and choking feeling of love. “The Love Nest,” goes back to the 1920s, even while remaining right in the present. Weaving in the quotes from the novel does more than set the tone and meaning for the song; it bridges the meanings in Fitzgerald’s prose with the sound of a hard-working jazz group playing its heart out. The songs are lovely contemplations, but stand on their own as gorgeous melodies to play and solo on.
All of this might have fallen apart in lesser hands, but Ichihara and band deliver marvelously on each tune. One has to go back perhaps all the way to Duke Ellington’s “Such Sweet Thunder,” a suite based on Shakespeare, to find such an intriguing example of jazz engaging with literature so fully and authentically. Like the novel, this CD makes you want to be in love, knowing and learning and enjoying the beauty of a story spectacularly well told, whether in prose or in music.