Funk Nation

If you filtered the spirit of James Brown through a tall Japanese man, Ryo Nakata is what you'd get. The Osaka Monaurail frontman has the spirit of funk soul busting out from inside him. As a teenager he was a jazz musician, but discovering funk and soul inspired him to form Osaka Monaurail in 1992. “Back in the late '80s I was a teenager, there was two big things: one of which is rare groove out of London and the other thing was hip hop. People were digging all the records, back in the '80s,” says Nakata. “I guess funk was not that big in the '90s, but it's not that big yet in the 2000s. I consider it's still very underground. Osaka Monaurail is an underground band.”

In his charming, hybrid Japanese-American accent, Nakata admits that he once wanted to be black. “But I was silly then,” he adds. “When I was 15 or 16, the first big thing for me was to listen to Ray Charles, and then I got into funky music: jazz music, soul music, rhythm and blues. I love James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett – all the funky stuff from the '60s.”

Osaka Monaurail have now been together, in various different forms, for 20 years, with Nakata the sole consistent member. They rehearse their tightly choreographed show three times a week, which allows them to bust out the funk with Japanese precision. “There was a guy who told me that we are very Japanese because the way we play the music, in the uniforms, and we take bows and, you know, he just mentioned that we were doing it in a Japanese way,” says Nakata. “So I was very proud of that. We are playing American music but, I guess, I hope I'm doing it in a Japanese way, you know what I mean?”
He likens it to the invention of radio. “It's like, I guess radio was invented by an American but it was kind of developed by a Japanese company or something like that. So I guess that's what's happening. And of course we're not dealing with radio or any technical stuff, we're dealing with music. I guess that's what we're doing. Well, you know, I guess Tokyo and Osaka and Melbourne, Sydney, I think we have something in common, you know. That is that we are not Americans but we appreciate American music in a different way.”

When Osaka Monaurail toured Australia last year for the first time, Nakata was amazed by Melbourne. “I knew The Bamboos, I had heard about The Cactus Channel, I had heard about Deep Street Soul, but actually that was last year for me that I found out that Melbourne was a big music city and a funky music city.” The band is currently in the process of writing the new Osaka Monaurail album, which they expect to release later this year. The album will feature a lot of original tunes, says Nakata, “but it doesn't really matter whether they are originals or they're taken from somewhere. People pick up on other ideas from all the records, you know. So that's what we do.”