Chumei Watanabe

Music Collection from 80's Japanese Hero Sci-Fi TV anime serie Kotetsu Jeeg . All music composed by Chumei Watanabe. Chumei Watanabe, whose name is also read Michiaki, was the defining composer of Japanese robot and superhero television, scoring Mazinger Z, Getter Robo and a long line of Toei productions. Steel Jeeg, created by Go Nagai and Tatsuya Yasuda and produced by Toei, ran on NET across 1975 and 1976; like much of Nagai's work it reached Italy at the end of the decade and stayed there, a fixture of a generation's afternoons.

Watanabe's writing for the series is brass-heavy funk shot through with orchestral drama: punchy horn sections, fuzz and wah guitar, electric organ and a hard rhythm section, broken up by martial fanfares for the robot itself and slower, more anxious cues for the story around it. The pieces are short, made to underscore action and then cut away, but the playing is loose and physical, closer to a session band than to a library orchestra.

That is why this music has travelled so far from its origins. The cues work as instrumental funk in their own right, which is how they found a second life among collectors and crate-diggers, and at the same time they carry the immediate charge of the images for anyone who grew up with them. Functional, fast and unpretentious, the score has aged into something that rewards the close listening it was never meant to ask for.