Monday Michiru
The Japanese-American singer navigates oceans and cultures
Japan Beat
By Dan Grunebaum
http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/619/music_beat.asp


Those who remember the heyday of Tokyo Journal over a decade ago may
also recall a CD review column written by a leggy lady whose
photograph graced the page. Beauty aside, Monday Michiru always
delivered a tasteful, considered set of picks mostly from the black,
dance and jazz sides of the musical universe.

While Monday still brings to music the same focus and drive she did
then, it's the less predictable passions in her life that have
lifted her from a Tokyo career and transported her to the other side
of the world. That's where I catch up with her, at the home outside
New York City she shares with her husband, jazz trumpeter Alex
Sipiagin, and their five-year-old son, Nikita.
Monday describes some of the difficulties that came with leaving
Tokyo behind after a 13-year career that began with a lead in the
1987 movie Hikaru Onna (Luminous Woman) and evolved into roles as an
acid jazz diva, media personality and music producer.

"I had a lot of challenges because I was newly married and got
pregnant and immediately had a child," she says. "Having lived in
Japan for so long and being part of the scene I was involved in, it
was hard to become a normal person. In a sense I relished it, but in
another sense I felt like The Incredibles guy—he was a superhero but
suddenly he has to take the form of being an insurance man."

While maintaining her career in Japan and also developing one in the
States, Monday, the daughter of noted Japanese jazz composer Toshiko
Akiyoshi and American sax player Charlie Mariano, sometimes finds
herself in the odd role of a suburban housewife. "Not to say I was a
superhero in Japan, but living here in the countryside, no one knows
who I am, no one knows what I'm doing. It's sort of funny: You get
invited over, you bring your baked goods. You're like, `Hi, I'm
Monday, oh yes, I know it's a strange name, oh yes, we're a mixed
couple.'"

Part of the issue may be that the American mainstream isn't ready
for the cosmopolitan mix of house, jazz, funk and worldbeat flavors
that inform her new album, Routes, whose release this week provides
the occasion for this interview. "When I listen to the radio in
Japan, I hear a rich combination of forces coming from around the
world, and that's something we don't see in America," she says. Even
in New York, she adds, "the [mainstream] radio stations are ghastly—
if you turn on the radio in the car, it's an attack of the Top 40,
the same song every 30 minutes."


Dance music influences from urban centers like New York and London,
notes Monday, came to the fore in Japan in a way they never did in
the US heartland, where house remains underground. "It's interesting
to me to see that because of a lot of the remix projects that I was
involved in as a vocalist, it's the house music scene that has
really embraced me," she says. "When I do performances, I still get
a very healthy amount of Japanese expats, but at this point perhaps
half of my audience is drawn from Americans who've heard my remixes,
or heard about me through word of mouth."

At the outset, Routes is very much informed by dance music currents.
With Monday's trademark clear, high and uplifting choruses rising
above tribal drums, "The Right Time" is a house music call to arms.
Monday has worked with the cream of the crop of dance music
producers, from Shinichi Osawa, who lends a hand on "Remember," to
Basement Jaxx. She even did a vocal house set alongside a DJ at
legendary Tokyo club Yellow over the New Year, where she was
welcomed like a returning conqueror.

"Quite honestly, I absolutely hate doing PA lives. But I was
fortunate to get my friend Genta, who's a wonderful percussionist
with the Orquesta de la Luz, to come up on stage and help me out.
Had he not been there, I would have just drowned. But it was a
festive time of the year, and everyone was very supportive—the
audience was drunk with the idea that I would be up on stage."

Later on in Routes, the stomping grooves of the opening tracks give
way to a reflectiveness that perhaps grew out of the 42-year-old's
new roles as wife, mother and wizened music industry veteran. The
warm "Philosophy Road," for example, uses Kyoto's Tetsugaku no Michi
as a metaphor to express her struggle to stay true to herself amid
the rat race.

With Routes, this has meant pursuing her own muse rather than bowing
to the demands of the market. "Economically, things are not good in
the music world," she says. "File-sharing really hurts the industry,
which eventually hurts the artist, because then demands are made
upon us to make more sellable goods rather than more artful goods.
It's a strain that no artist wants to go through, and I've chosen
not to go down that route. They were saying do this or do that to
make it more marketable, which would have watered down what I was
trying to do." Monday ended up releasing Routes worldwide through
the Artistshare website, with a traditional CD release set only for
Japan, where she licensed it Geneon Entertainment.

Later on in Routes, the influence of her husband Alex, a Russian
trumpeter and arranger of international renown who was recently in
Japan with the Mingus Big Band, makes itself felt. In particular,
the dense, layered jazz harmonies and syncopations of "Don't"
capture the complexities of Monday's quest to balance her innate
verbosity with the need to quiet down and give herself a moment of
silence with which to experience the world and her spirit unmediated
by language.

Monday will also be prefacing her upcoming Japan Routes release tour
with a dip into acoustic jazz with, of all people, her mother. Tokyo
Symphony Orchestra conductor Naoto Otomo asked them to perform a
duet in Tokyo's temple of classical music, the Tokyu Bunka Kaikan,
for its first-ever pop week. Mother and daughter will be performing
some of Akiyoshi's compositions with Monday as vocalist, and Monday
will also be playing her first love, the flute. This marks only the
second time she will have performed with her mother as a duet (the
first was at Carnegie Hall), and Monday says she's looking forward
to it. "How can you not be proud?" she laughs. "There's your mother
who was screaming at you as a kid, and there you are up on stage
with her!"