Hyde Park Music Festival

Suburban Saitama’s leftfield event reprises last year’s successful launch

Asylum Street Spankers Courtesy of Tom’s Cabin

In the early ’70s, a number of young Japanese musicians moved into houses originally built for US military families near a now-shuttered air base in Saitama. Unofficially called Hyde Park and now known as Inariyama Park, the district became the focus of a new wave of Japanese rock created by artists such as Haruomo Hosono, later of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and seminal folk-rocker Chu Kosaka.

To pay tribute to their spirit (and to draw people to the area), the Hyde Park Music Festival was launched last year, and it proved successful enough that the promoters decided to bring it back again. This year’s event runs over two days, with a bill that features veteran Japanese musicians, including those from blues supergroup Yukadan as well as younger acts like jazz/world music collective Double Famous and influential indie-rock eccentric Shutoku Mukai of the Zazen Boys.

Among the overseas guests are the Asylum Street Spankers, who have just released Mommy Says No! on Buffalo Records in Japan and who will be following up their Hyde Park appearance with a nationwide tour.

The Spankers’ sixth studio album, Mommy Says No! shows why the group from Austin, Texas, are perhaps the best positioned to take the mantle from Dan Hicks as America’s leading folk/jazz/country comedic provocateurs. Formed in 1994 “at a booze and hallucinogen-fueled party at the Dabbs Hotel in Llano, Texas,” the Spankers have a rotating cast of about ten members, with an instrumentation based on the classic jug band makeup of acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, washboard and kazoo.

Like Hicks, the Spankers combine expert chops with a finely barbed sense of humor. On Mommy Says No! they take aim at a broad swath of cultural shibboleths and prove fearless in their mocking of such hallowed figures as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, packaging it in a foot-tapping brew of uptempo rhythms and ripping solos.

Also of an acoustic mind at the Hyde Park Festival are the John Cowan Band, led by “newgrass” singer-songwriter John Cowan, who like the Spankers will be following up their Hyde Park appearance with a national tour that stops off in Tokyo.

Indiana-native Cowan first came to fame in the ’80s as lead singer for the New Grass Revival, in which he joined banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck and introduced a fresh generation of fans to the bluegrass music of America’s southeastern Appalachian region. Rather than being revivalists, however, the band brought a contemporary touch and subject matter to the “pickin’ and grinnin’” bluegrass tradition.

After the group broke up in 1990, Cowan recorded in styles ranging from rock to soul to blues, gradually returning to bluegrass at the end of the decade. The John Cowan Band takes up where the New Grass Revival left off, returning to the singer’s acoustic roots with a cast of virtuoso musicians. “It’s pretty darn difficult what we were up to back then,” he writes in notes for his most recent album, New Tattoo. “We weren’t really playing bluegrass. We were playing contemporary music on traditional instruments. This incarnation of my band is the first time since New Grass that I’ve felt we could get back to that special place.”

In addition to lighthearted bluegrass romps and country tearjerkers, the album also shows a contemporary willingness to deal with difficult subject matter in the form of the song “Drown,” which tells Cowan’s personal tale of becoming a victim of child molestation. “For men, this has become a taboo subject,” he says. “One reason it’s not talked about by men is that it is a source of shame for us. Art has a responsibility to put things like this out there.”

Inariyama Park, Sep 9-10. The Asylum Street Spankers play Shibuya Club Quattro Sep 17 and Yokohama Thumps Up Sep 18. The John Cowan Band play Shibuya Club Quattro Sep 11. See concert listings (popular) for details.

Got something to say about this article? Send a letter to the editor at letters@metropolis.co.jp.

Listen to the Metropolis Podcast, the coolest guide to what goes on this week in Tokyo.

Looking for international friends? Check Japan, Inc. Friends now - it's 100% free!