Shinichi Kato: Bass on Cinema

Sep 27, 2019

With a vintage romantic feel inspired by classic cinema, Shinichi Kato’s 2011 release Bass on Cinema is a well-crafted collection of great film music. Performed as a duo, with Kato on bass and Taihei Asakawa on piano and synthesizer, the album contains absorbing and dramatic moments, as befitting a tribute to the great songs of cinema. With the deep bass on melody, the dazzling piano and arrangements fill out the canvas with cinematic moods ranging from calm, sweet, and introspective to mysterious suspense, classical refinement, rock-and-roll abandon, and delicate melancholy.

The movies inspiring this album span decades, genres, and countries, with American, French, Italian, and Japanese cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s represented. Some of the more well-known numbers feature in movies such as Deer Hunter, Easy Rider, Charade, and Mahogany, whose popular theme “Do You Know Where You’re Going To” is interpreted as dazzling Bach-jazz-rock fusion, one of the album’s catchy standouts.

Other album highlights include music from the Italian classic Cinema Paradiso and legendary film composer Ennio Morricone, beautifully weighty with dramatic significance, played over two album tracks as if a sublime intermission and denouement for this thematic outing.