1950 Live Peformance

1950 Live Performance.

Here is the good professor himself discussing the above recordings in a lecture titled "Negotiating the Cold War: Yamaguchi Yoshiko in Sacramento 1950"    you can view this talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGWCjBPmc4w     and here:

https://youtu.be/kGWCjBPmc4w?si=6ueDthV-BwhNElMo

Recorded on December 8, 2022, this was in the video description:

"This talk focuses on singer and actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko in the early 1950s as she worked to remake her image from the wartime propoganda idol Ri Koran (Chinese: Li Xianglan) into the Hollywood actress Shirley Yamaguchi under the tensions of Cold War demands for integration and containment. Focusing on a recently unearthed private recording of Yamaguchi in concert in 1950 Sacramento, the talk will explore how the singer and her Japanese American audience negotiated their tenuous new positions in a post-imperial, post-incarceration world." 

In the video, the good professor says these recordings are "an audio archive of a process of transpacific negotiation, one that was taking place between . . . ".   I couldn't listen to the rest of his jargon-filled mischaracterization of the recordings which seemed designed to signal his virtue to the 'in-crowd'. This man believes 'negotiation' is uber-alles.  

[John M: I strongly disagree with this academic's characterization of the 1950 Sacramento Concert. People were there to enjoy themselves, and they really enjoyed hearing authentic Japanese songs being sung by some of the best Japanese performers from Japan. I would not use the word "negotiate" in any sense to describe the audience's love of this music, in fact, I would say the prevailing feeling of the audience was opposite to 'negotiate' and closer to "this is our music and you can take it or leave it". ] 

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These youtube recordings are for everyone who wonders what it was like to hear Yoshiko Yamaguchi singing live in an onstage performance. Here she is singing, speaking (in English, Japanese, and Mandarin) laughing, and enjoying herself while entertaining a Japanese-American audience. Please feel free to make copies of these tracks (in case some phony copyright assertion is made). Yamaguchi herself would have liked these to be in the public domain rather than being privately held like they are now.  

A word about Yoshiko's singing here: by 1950 she was thirty years old and near the peak of her singing career, having taken lessons continuously for over fifteen years. Some of the songs (like Suzhou Serenade) she had been singing and refining for ten years, and the result (as you can hear on these videos) is spectacular indeed. Add to this the input of western piano arrangements and rhythm and a song like Tokyo Serenade just swings so nicely! when Yoshiko 'holds' those notes, the angels also weep


Blogger Yanagi says:
素晴らしい歌声ですね。
この動画は、私も含めて、日本中の李香蘭ファンが見たがっていたものです。
[She has] a wonderful singing voice.
This video is what I and other Lee Koran fans in Japan really wanted to see!

Enjoy:





and the below version of Soshu Yakyoku has received almost 695,000 views!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ht7Wkkc3s