The true story behind that crazy Japanese "jazz opera" video: it's a peach

Japanese TV star Tamori

It’s Boxing Day, which as you probably know has nothing to do with pugilism (despite some jazz fans’ desire to celebrate Miles Davis’s best-known hobby).  Rather, Boxing Day allows for another day if gift-giving; and in that spirit, I share with you a strange and wondrous item that several folks have sent me in the last two weeks.

Although this thing has been available via YouTube for years now, it’s undergone a sudden rediscovery among jazz fans.  Even the first few moments of the video will help explain the fascination.  On the face of it, this “jazz opera” involves a fairly incomprehensible story about a giant peach containing a human child; set in some folklore village of ancient Japan.  To confuse things further, the story has been set to a series of well-known American jazz tunes from the 50s and 60s.  How the “peach boy” fits together with songs by Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Horace Silver and others – well, that has left the online jazz community somewhat dazed, undeniably entertained, and wildly envious of whatever the creators of this experiment in recombinant artistic DNA might have been smoking at the time.

As it turns out, the story of the Peach Boy – Momotaro, in Japanese – makes plenty of sense to pretty much everyone of Japanese ancestry.  It’s among the oldest and most popular Japanese fairy tales, narrated to Japanese children for more than five centuries, comparable to our Little Red Riding Hood, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  (“Mmmm. This miso tastes just right!”)  You’ll find a good description here.  (And remember, this is the same culture that, centuries later, would give us a 747-sized moth controlled by two adult women standing about 6 inches tall.)

But what does any of this have to do with classic jazz compositions like Miles Davis’s “Milestones,” Benny Golson’s “Blues March,” Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage,” or Bill Evans’s “Waltz For Debby”?  (All of those and more are used as the operatic “score” for the action, played out in full costumes and elaborate stage sets.)  Even people fully versed in the story of Peach Boy – like my girlfriend, who is Japanese-American and heard the story of Momotaro growing up – find themselves staring slack-jawed at this mash-up, or at least until they burst out laughing in delighted disbelief.

So here’s the scoop.  The video is taken from a television program by one of the “big three” TV comedians in Japan, Morita Kazuyoshi, universally known by his screen name, Tamori.  He started appearing on TV in the mid-70s, and from what I can gather, this production appeared in the late 80s or early 90s – presumably on the program called “It’s OK To Laugh” (which aired several times each week).  That’s Tamori himself, with his trademark sunglasses, portraying the old woman at the beginning of the piece and the man-sized bird at the end.  

Apparently, Japan has few bigger jazz fans than Tamori (who allegedly owns or has owned a Tokyo jazz club).  That helps explain how this soundtrack came into existence, I suppose, though I remain agog at what sparked the brainstorm to use these songs to tell this story.  (I tried contacting Tamori a couple of weeks ago, but no response yet.  I’ll keep you posted.)  And since Japan’s well-documented mania for American jazz does focus on the hard-bop era of the 50s and 60s, it’s a safe bet that these tunes resonated more with the mainstream Japanese audience than they would here at home.

For now, though, just enjoy the thrilling tale of the Peach Boy of Japan, retold in story and song by one of postwar Japan’s true cultural icons.  Somewhere, the ghosts of bebop are smiling – or at least they will be, once they stop scratching their heads in sheer perplexity.