The Tokyo Boys - "Midnight in Tokyo" MGM Records, 1963

 

Middle-aged male jet setters in 1963 would fly to Tokyo for business and, of course, pleasure. With their business accounts, they can stay at 5-star hotels such as The Prince or The Imperial and go to the small but exclusive bars in the Ginza. These bars would have hostesses where they pour your drinks and laugh at your dirty jokes. "Midnight in Tokyo," recorded in Tokyo and in 1963, is the soundtrack to that type of life. 

When I first started to go to Tokyo in 1989, there were traces of the 1963 lifestyle. Still orientated to the Japanese salarymen who have expense accounts through their company or visiting businessmen from America and Europe. That world still exists, but the outside world is much bigger now. Still, there is a romantic feeling for the decade of beautifully neon-lighted streets in the Ginza. It's still there, but more of a shopping experience as well as a location for refined dining and drinking pleasures. 

The Tokyo Boys made only one album, and it is this piece of exotica. Mostly big band instrumentation but filtered through various Japanese or Asian melodies. There's the Latin rumba, but with touches of the orient. For me, the album reminds me of the soundtrack to a lot of the 60s Yakuza films. I'm not sure if there is an original Tokyo Boys album release in Japan. Still, MGM records made this album as part of their "21 Channel Sound" series. The technique is that they used 21 microphones in the studio, a big thing in 1963. Of course, it's well-recorded, but the purpose here is to transport the listener to another world.  One where they can enjoy the fruits of labor, work, and the all-night drinking session with one's fellow office workers. 

Martin Denny took the listener to Hawaii or other ports of "exotica," but here in "Midnight in Tokyo" is a destination to one getting lost in Japanese elegance. It's a myth, but when you are a broke listener in one's studio apartment, this is the world of escape pleasures.