Jazz Monthly: When I had heard about this project in the works, I’m hearing that, “You know hey man, Hiroshima is going to be doing not really a greatest hits album…
DK: It’s not a greatest hits album…
Jazz Monthly: Yeah, I know and that’s the distinction I’m making now. When I heard about that I said well, “That’s great. I’d love to have it all on one CD. A lot of the great songs that I’ve loved and known over the years”… but then man, hey, I heard that, “No,” they re-recorded these great songs and it’s not a compilation or an anthology of songs from previous albums. This is a much more ambitious project because you’re actually going into the studio, re-recording these songs again with your current band members.
DK: Pretty much live.
Jazz Monthly: Pretty much live, the way you would do it live at a concert or a performance.
DK: Live in the studio is basically, as they call it, that’s functionally what these tracks are. There were overdubs. I had to overdub because I was the producer but all of June’s solos that you hear, all of Kimo’s, our great piano player, all of his stuff, and obviously drums, they all went down live. We wanted it to be as organic as possible. What we wanted to do is pick songs that our fans kept coming back again and again to hear, along with songs that we felt helped define us. So, in other words, rather than us defining the songs, we wanted to take the songs and let them say who we are now. That was the whole point of it because we’re a very small nuclear group now. I mean, fundamentally there are just six of us and we wanted to let the songs be the songs and let them guide us and let the songs breathe so that people could hear Dean Cortez on bass or Shoji Kameda on Tyco, or Kimo Cornwell on keyboard and just hear how they approach their instruments. We’re so blessed. They’re all such great cats and such great players.
Jazz Monthly: Yeah and I know its your current nucleus band, and of course with some guest artists. Let’s talk about some of the cuts, the first cut, Winds of Change, I know that’s from your 1980 album Odori.
DK: yeah, wow, and perfectly pronounced too! (laughing)
Jazz Monthly: You received a Grammy nomination, and it was that one. What I noticed between this one and the original, is that this has a more symphonic-like string sound than the original twenty-nine years ago; a slightly different groove. Of course, Shoji Kameda, and Danny Yamamoto, they just laid down a great beat with you playing soprano sax. What a great chorus… just a great re-recording!
DK: Thank you. What we did, we did use synthesized strings. That’s simply based on the fact that we couldn’t afford to go into the studio and do a big string date anymore because those things cost a gazillion dollars now. We did go to Maestro George Del Barrio – genius string arranger – who did those original charts when we first recorded it and conducted the string section. We went through his house and ironically we found a lot of Michael Jackson’s charts because he did all of the strings for Michael Jackson and Earth, Wind, and Fire, and many television shows and movies. We found most of… but not all of the original charts. Kimo, our keyboard player reconstructed them and played them on big string synthesizers. But fundamentally it has just the six of us playing. Winds of Change literally means a stream as it goes down a mountainside… follows its own journey… and that was the notion of that song. It’s a concert piece for sure.
Jazz Monthly: Oh man, it really works. It’s done in just a very hip, nice way. The second cut, Turning Point, which was from your 1992 album Providence. That’s, of course, June on koto, just very airy and very seductive; just a wonderful groove Dan. You on the kind of ethereal string pads, and the Tyco player Shoji.
Then One Wish from your LP back in I guess the mid-eighties, I don’t remember the year, Another Place. Now that was, I know, an incredible single. That was your first gold record, right, One Wish.
DK: Yeah, Another Place was the record and One Wish was on it and yeah, it was our first gold record. Ironically that song is played all over the world even today. Its an odd thing how those things happen because it was like we had finished the record, we were on CBS Sony and they said, “You know, you need a radio play song,” and I resist that notion, but they sort of threw down the gauntlet, “You mean to tell me you couldn’t use your sound and make it a little more acceptable to commercial radio.” I thought well, I’d give it a shot. Over the weekend I put together a track, and June and I just went to the studio and played. I used a drum machine, I’ll admit it, and played all of the other instruments. From start to finish in eight hours, including the mix, setting up keyboards and June’s koto playing, we walked out the door. It’s one of those weird things in music… for some reason it caught on.
Jazz Monthly: You know, one of these songs that I knew had to be on there when I heard you were doing this album; it’s a killer and you probably know where I’m going with this. One that you’d never getaway with not performing live, not that you’d want to but of course… Dada.
DK: Yeah, that’s interesting. You really know our music.
Jazz Monthly: I really do, and the thing about that is just, Yvette, with the lead vocal… just very seductive and soulful… but yet it had that great Asian blanket throughout it all. I mean, I remember that tune Dada was played all over the radio I guess when you first started recording. I mean it was all over the place.
DK: That was on our first record 1979.
Jazz Monthly: You just had to include this as a representative.
DK: Yeah, that was one. There were five songs that were on almost every one of the thousands of lists we got on our website, and Dada was one of them which surprised us because we thought, “So long ago,” and we’re getting responses from people in their late twenties, early thirties, and we’re like, “You were like one then, how would you know.” But we’ve been so blessed having been around so long that it’s become generational. I mean we go to Washington D.C.; this is not a joke. We have families that come, and we’ll have three generations of the family and they all have their own records and CD. So when we do autographs, we autograph sequentially… the entire family.
It is such a blessing, the young cats, I mean just like I remember we stayed in a hotel where there was a big hip-hop tour. The hip-hop band were coming by to get autographs like: Kid n’ Play and all of these hip-hop bands and they said, “Man we grew up listening to Hiroshima.” We were like, “Are you serious?” (both laughing)
Jazz Monthly: Hey listen man, don’t forget that your band caught on especially big with the African American community in L.A. and in New York, and around the world.
DK: Oh yeah, definitely… our main market.
Jazz Monthly: But anyway, the point that you’re making is that its three generations! You are signing autographs for people who bought it originally in 1979 and 1980. Now they may have bought it in the early nineties and now today, right?
