(Jazz, Swing, Jazz Pop) Kojima Mayumi - Swingin' caravan! - 2006, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Kojima Mayumi's maturation over the years has been exciting to watch, as she evolved from the cutesy, almost childlike persona of the nascent years of her career to the confident, sultry diva we've seen this side of the millennium. That it was this cute playfulness that contributed greatly to the charm of her early material cannot be doubted, but gradually she moved away from that as her musical appetite increased in its avidity. It wasn't just the strengthened influence of jazz, an important element of her repertoire from the very beginning, but also a newfound enthusiasm to incorporate styles as wide-ranging as rockabilly, reggae, Americana, and cha-cha to her own music. The girlish elements never disappeared completely of course, and traces can still be heard in albums as recent as 2003's Ai no Poltergeist ("Koi wa Psychedelic") or the following year's Pablo no Koibito ("Chairo no Kobin"). But at the same time it would've been senseless to characterize that as her musical centerpiece.
So it's interesting to see this persona reemerge as prominently as it does in her latest album, Swingin' Caravan. Listeners accustomed to her recent material will be thrown off very quickly. From the very second bar in, in fact, as Kojima delivers the first line of the opening track, "Last Shot!," in a completely off-kilter manner that would've felt more at home with her 1995 debut, Cecil no Blues, than any of her recent records. Her affectation here, backed by a vaudevillian score, is girlish to the extreme - not an unfamiliar element of her music certainly, but it's hard to think of anything she did recently that takes it to this level. This latest turn in her stylistic trajectory is almost disorienting for those who have followed her career and had assumed that she'd shed much of that persona.
But Kojima has amassed too much breadth in her musical vocabulary to simply retrace the steps she covered ten years ago. She proves more than capable of playing the amorous songstress when she so chooses, in tracks such as "Chocolate" and "Madame Butterfly." The usual adjectives (girlish, childlike, cutesy) apply, but there is also a sweet languor to her vocal delivery that gives these songs a sensuous quality. And "Turkey Coffee," a frenzied account of her imbibing of an exotic coffee, is perhaps one of the most eccentric performances that she ever recorded. It's the soundtrack of her getting drugged up and going off the deep end, accompanied by middle-easternish horns, as the rising tempo drives her vocals into further heights of madness.
In the end, what will strike listeners the most about Swingin' Caravan is how un-rock and roll it is in comparison with Kojima's three preceding albums. Her band remains capable of supplying appealing grooves, but here those grooves seem more whimsical, standing ready to flutter about and turn pirouettes (figuratively speaking, of course) to indulge the singer's every fancy. So yes, there is much that harks back to the playful nature of Cecile no Blues or Hatachi no Koi, but her serious forays into swing have left an indelible imprint, and Swingin' Caravan strikes a nice balance between the two.