(This would ordinarily go on my other weblog, but I suspect that I’m more likely to find knowledgeable musicians among the visitors here.)
One of the many distinctions of the eccentric anime Oh! Edo Rocket is the soundtrack. It’s mostly swing. Yusuke Homma (or Honma) is credited as the composer. A friend says that Homma didn’t merely use the big band numbers as models but plagiarized the tunes. Although much of the soundtrack sounds familiar to my ears, I don’t quite recognize any particular melodies. My knowledge of that musical era is slight, however, so I’m wondering if Homma can really claim to have written the music.
Here are three of the numbers, “Swing,”, “Laid Back” and “Matsuri.” Have you heard these before?
Well, Swing sounds like a mix of things – the drumline recalls Krupa’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” but there also are hints of Pennsylvania 6-5000 in there. And “Matsuri” REALLY smacks strongly of “In the Mood.”
That said, no one sounds EXACTLY like the piece it echos; it’s more like they’re pastiches of Big Band music (apparently drawing heavily from Glenn Miller)
I’m not so much thinking it’s plagiarising as it is “sampling” – like rappers do, you know? Lift a hook you like from a song, mash it in with some other hooks you like, and call it something new. And claim that the original composers can’t do boo about it. Or, heck, maybe the Miller tunes have slid into public domain, for all I know. (Then why not use them, instead of composing something that sounds kinda-sorta like?)
I agree with fillyjonk – noted down both “Sing, Sing, Sing” and “In the Mood” when I was listening to the tracks.
“Pastiche” was exactly the word I planned to use, but many of the licks are ripped off from big band charts wholesale. As noted by fillyjonk, Gene Krupa’s drum licks were taken from “Sing, sing, sing” and some of Glen Millers big band arrangements and chord voicings from “In the Mood” (and others) are there too. I really hate it when “composers” do that, but it’s quite common… unfortunately.
Parts of “Laid Back” remind me strongly of a lounge version of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”
As far as I know, no one copyrights chord progressions or voicings, so he can probably claim to be the composer and suffer no legal repercussions. But, it is obvious that he has just copied someone else’s chord progressions, chord voicings, and even orchestration and percussion solos, which makes him legally a composer but annoyingly uncreative and possessed of suspect artistic ability. If he’d called it “Variations on a Tune by [insert composer here]” it could have been considered a cute tribute, but as it is I’m shaking my head in disgust.
Still, “sampling” is apparently an extremely common phenomenon in current popular music, and he’s just married the practice of current popular music with the sound of older popular music. (I know little about current popular music, but one of my musicology profs wrote a paper about sampling in hip hop for a conference last year.)