Tenderness -My Ballade-
Healing at the Peak of Kishino Yoshiko's Early Career

Date：17, Jun, 2017
Investigated and Written by Misaka Youhei
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In fact, one day, I used to be a manual laborer. The tiny limited experience says that manual laborers don't listen to jazz music. Of course, it doesn't mean that they are perfectly unfamiliar with jazz. However, in Japan, I suppose it is more difficult to find a manual laborer who usually listens to jazz than finding out a pair of earring which you lost at the summer wide beach. In my opinion, Japanese manual laborers mostly like pops than jazz.

Then, in Japan, it's supposed jazz are mainly heard by white-collar people or those who hardly work. But we are impossible to get away from stress in any fields. So, like manual laborers need some healing as rubdowns and cold compresses, they are also in need of healing. Well, the healing like "Tenderness," a 2000 album by a Japanese female jazz pianist Kishino Yoshiko.

"Tenderness" must be a peak of her early career. Kishino got into the jazz world -like Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson- in consequence of her senior when she belonged to high school. I guess her life is all based on music, because she got married with a musical producer.

Although Kishino'd played on her piano trio in America while she was in her early career, she gradually put forward her identity as a Japanese. She's recently played Japanese nursery songs more than foreign blues. "Tenderness" is considered to be her early peak with that current of her career in mind. It includes Kishino Yoshiko who still played jazz standard songs and foreign ones.

You may say "No matter what it includes, it must be a subjective problem whether healing is felt or not." I can hardly deny. However, it's also true that Kishino's then character fits the album concept; playing just ballads. I believe that it undoubtedly includes peacefulness and pleasure like "Moon Beams" by Bill Evans. Peaceful benevolence is tightly felt as one identity. And so I said that it was guessed to be a peak of her early career.

In the last article, I wrote as "it might be a superficial opinion that Kishino's originality was supposed to be something like healing." However, I believe healing is indeed given by the songs in her early career like "Tenderness" and "My Little Christmas." I can still feel it now.