Joe Hisaishi (Mamoru Fujisawa)

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Biography

Joe Hisaishi was born on December 6, 1950 in Nagano, Japan under the name Mamoru Fujisawa. His musical training started early on, when he began to take violin lessons at age five. It was around this time that he first discovered his passion for music. Fujisawa truly began to explore this passion in the 70’s, during which, a cultural menagerie of Japanese popular music, new-age, and early electronic music flourished. Inevitably, those genres influenced Fujisawa's early compositions. (Wikipedia) Fujisawa was highly influenced by the new-wave of Japanese electronica such as the Yellow Magic Orchestra and Ryuichi Sakamoto group. It was not until 1975, that he made his first public performance, and it is not until a decade later that he dawns his stage name, Joe Hisaishi, on his first solo album Alpha Bet City. (Dasnoy & Tsong, 2013) Hisaishi developed his name from the American artist, Quincy Jones. The kanji for "Hisaishi" is read similarly to the Japanese pronunciation of "Quincy," and "Joe," came from "Jones."(IMDB)
In 1983, a record company recommended Hisaishi to Hayao Miyazaki as a possible candidate to create the Image Album for Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, which, at the time, was being made into a movie. (Team Ghiblink, Nausicaa.net) Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was a balance between electronic and classical music, a blending of new compositions along with covers of Handel and Brahms's music. (Dasnoy & Tsong, 2013) Miyazaki, inevitably, was highly impressed with Hisaishi’s Image Album and frequently listened to it during the production of the film. The soundtrack for the film was slated to be composed by its producer, Isao Takahata. However, after Miyazaki’s strong recommendation f...

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... http://www.sputnikmusic.com/bands/Joe-Hisaishi/19710/
Team Ghiblink (n.d.). Joe Hisaishi in Budokan. In GhibliWiki. Retrieved from http://www.nausicaa.net/wiki/Joe_Hisaishi_in_Budokan
Team Ghiblink. (n.d.). Joe Hisaishi. Retrieved from http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/hisaishi/
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Joe Hisaishi. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hisaishi
Wondercity Inc. (2011). Wondercity Inc. Official Fanpage Biography. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/JoeHisaishi.official/info
Wu, C. Y. (2007). A Study of Joe Hisaishi's Film Music in Hayao Miyazaki's Animation. (Master's thesis, Taipei University of the Arts, Taipei, Taiwan), Available from National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan. (003604684)Retrieved from http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/login?o=dnclcdr&s=id="095TNUA5249003".&searchmode=basic

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