"Chicken a la Swing" ala Japanese

Here's a pretty impressive video I found of some Japanese dudes KILLING IT on a Dick McDonough/Carl Kress number, while appearently playing some beautiful Japanese-made archtops. Really clean work - too bad there's not much to find about the players or the guitars. Still, DAMN. Nice work, boys.

Update on 2012-09-30 05:50 by Campus Five

So the internets answered the questions left by my hastily typed post. The two guys in this awesome video are Takashi Nakayama and Yuji Kamihigashi. I know this (aside from the fact that it actually says it at the end one of their youtube videos) because I got super nice email from Yuji. Yuji's the one playing the dot neck L-5 style guitar, and Takashi is the gent playing the one with the block inlays. Takashi plays with the Sweet Hollywiians, while Yuji claims not to be a professional. Personally, I think he's got the chops. 

I was pretty floored by Yuji's chordal playing. His big three favorites are George Van Eps, Allan Reuss, and Carl Kress, which explains it all. I was wondering if he's playing in standard tuning or going for the Carl Kress extended banjo tuning (Bb, F, C, G, B, D.), and he mentioned he was playing A, E, D, G, B, E, basically combining the bottom two strings from a 7 string with the top 4 of a conventional guitar. He mentioned that's he changed back to standard tuning because it allows him more freedom to improvise. 

He sent me a link to another video of him a Takashi, here playing a tune he translated as "Cricket Swing" composed by Yoshihiro Arita. What a great sounding tune - and just listen to that awesome chord solo. Takashi and Yuji are really killing it!

The Sweet Hollywiians will be in California for a couple gigs in October, and I'm definitely going to drop by their show at Boulevard Music in Culver City on 10/19/12: http://boulevardmusic.com/livemusic/382.html