Happy New Year! To kick 2009 off right, I invite you to enjoy this marvelous performance of "Marching March" by UA.

"Marching March" was composed in the '60s by HATTORI Kōichi (服部公一). The lyrics, written by SAKATA Hirō (阪田寛夫), open with the narrator ordering his legs to carry him to a field, via various kinds of roads and making agreeable sounds such as zakku zakku and bokko bokko, so that he can search frogs and earthworms for navels and eyes respectively.

("Sanpo", the song that opens Tonari no Totoro, seems to me a loving homage to "Marching March" in both theme and structure, by the way. No idea if there are any on-the-record discussions of the matter.)

Anyhow, the 1965 performance of "Marching March" by AMACHI Fusako (天地総子) and the Otowa Yurikago Kai (音羽ゆりかご会) picked up a Japan Record Award in 1965, and looked something like this. Today, your standard uta no onē-san/onii-san rendition looks like this... so as much as I like Amachi's groove, UA's slower, country-brass-banded performance is a kind of revelation.

As it happens, UA recorded a bunch of these for NHK a few years ago, without taking her chicken suit off once, and they're all on the 'Tube now. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Green green (by the New Christy Minstrels, although with a slightly different lyrical gist in translation)
• Tinsagu nu hana ("Balsam flowers", an Ryūkyūan classic)
• Te no hira wo taiyō ni ("Hold your hands up to the sun", another beloved Japanese kid's song, here given a kind of breakdown free-jazz treatment)
• Yama no ongakuka ("Mountain musicians", apparently originally a German song)
• Umi ("Ocean", a official folk song from Monbushō, revitalized here by the addition of sitar)
• Mori no kuma-san ("Bear in the forest", UA and her mysterious friend's performance of which smolders with appropriate fairy-tale eroticism)