At 79, Haruomi Hosono returned to the Greek Theatre on Sept. 20, 47 years after he last played it with his band Yellow Magic Orchestra.
“An architect of Japanese pop,” dubbed by music reporter Ben Sisario, Hosono has influenced prominent Western artists like Vampire Weekend and Harry Styles. Hosono’s 57-year career has moved through psychedelic, exotica, synth-pop and ambient. The Greek set drew on most of it: tropical and chinoiserie figures on guitar and mandolin, buoyant runs on marimba, and an evening that kept sliding between decades.
Hosono’s 23rd album, “Yours Sincerely,” released nine days before his headliner show, was created to explore translating the concept of compassion, mothership and sympathy into music between languages. While the word compassion comes from the literary meaning of “co-suffering,” the Japanese expression (思いやり, omoiyari) carries the positive connotation of sharing rejoice.
“The perspective, the emotional angle — subtly but fundamentally different,” his Instagram post reads. “Instead, I turned to a more familiar word often used to close a letter: ‘Sincerely.’”
Introduced to Hosono’s music through her partner, attendee Nikki Kilmer was struck by the honesty and warmth throughout the night’s live performance. “Once you hear his music and all of the bands that he’s been in, you can’t help but love it,” said Kilmer, an LA-based vinyl DJ also known as Miss Frizzle.
Many in the audience, like Kilmer’s partner, came to Hosono through YMO, the trio in which he played bass alongside drummer Yukihiro Takahashi and Academy Award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Hosono named the band by slipping a racial color into white magic and black magic. The band took up the argument, subverting Western exotica through the lens of three Japanese musicians. Hosono reaffirmed it through a tropical, exotica-infused cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s piano-based “Hong Kong Blues,” a song about an American stranded in Hong Kong.
The evening passes down a legacy, both in the band and the audience. Hosono jokingly took two smoking breaks during the show to rest and highlight backing duos Kukuku and Chappo. Looping and layering the autoharp melody, a bird whistle, bubbles she blew into water, and the rustle of a feather-grass bundle, Kukuku percussionist Manami Kakudo briefly carried the audience to an open field alongside a burbling creek in early spring.
The cigarette breaks also centered the two-piece Japanese instrumental band Chappo in front of an American crowd. Oto Fukuhara on guitar and Yuta Hosono, Haruomi’s grandson, on bass, the duo reinterpreted the animated film “Night on the Galactic Railroad” soundtrack, “La Stelfesto de Centauro,” with their former drummer, So Ebihara.
Chappo thickened the soundtrack. Hosono’s 1985 recording is spare. It paints an uncanny scene of children circling around the town square with festival masks and lanterns under a dark night. The band played it warm and close, with his grandson carrying the bass line, making the lineage audible.
Mark Wasiel brought his family of four that evening after watching Hosono’s last Los Angeles headlining show in 2019. First encountered and captured by YMO at his high school music retail job in the 1980s, Wasiel grew into Hosono’s solo and collaborative projects over the last two decades.
“Thinking this might be the last chance to see him in the United States,” he said. “I definitely wanted to come out and see it with my kids.”
Between sets, Hosono joked about the pacemaker messing up his rhythm. The artist toured in Tokyo in September soon after heart surgery. The show went well, his interpreter explained, because the crowd sent him “power of healing.” The crowd rose in a wave from the front rows back to give a standing ovation every time he reappeared on the stage.
Fans lost two YMO members to cancer in 2023. Hosono is the last one standing.
“The last song really moved me to tears,” said Vincent Campillo regarding the solo version of “STELLA,” a reinterpreted 2003 song first released by Haruomi and Takahashi’s electronica duo, Sketch Show.
Campillo, Kilmer’s partner and a Highland Park-based vinyl DJ known as Mr. Palomar, has been a YMO and Hosono listener for a decade. “I realized that Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi were singing backing vocals, with the drum machine, and he was accompanying his band members who have passed,” Campillo said.
Campillo adds with a laugh: he first turned down the idea of attending the show for budget reasons, but eventually changed his mind. “It was the best decision.”
Edited by Justin Ha