Ikimono Gakari is a very successfull Japanese pop trio, the songs by this group are very popular in Japan.
During the last days the song Yell by Ikomono Gakari has sticked to my mind – and I have listened to many videos with different versions of this song.
I have first found a version of this song for mandolin orchestra, and I was fascinated by this music and curious about who was the composer of this piece. In the following video Yell is played by musicians of a mandolin orchestra in Usa, Oita prefecture. The video shows paintings – including some nice paintings with mandolins – while the music plays:
YELL（いきものがかり）
I think this song is really well suited to be played by mandolin orchestra. I have found 3 different versions played by a mandolin orchestra, one version for mandolin and guitar and a great version for classical guitar (video not available in Germany).
“M” YELL いきものがかり Ikimono Gakari
“YELL” Ikimono Gakari, is very, very popular among Japanese teenagers.
NHK, a Japanese TV station, like BBC in the UK, selected this song as a junior high school chorus national contest song in 2009. Therefore, almost every teenager in Japan knows this song so well xDYou may notice that i played another old guitar, which i borrowed from the owner of the old clothing store, Blonde on Blonde, where i happened to dropped-in two weeks ago. There are some old guitars with dust and i decided to pick up some of them to clean, polish and played by me as i love all the guitars on the earth =)
I tried to find out more about this song, and I was surprised that I found many versions of this song sung by youth choirs, including this great video with hundreds of teenaged singers:
郡山第二中学校 「YELL」
Finally I found out that the song has been composed for a competition held by the Japanese broadcasting company NHK – which led to the fact that almost every teenager now knows this song, and many teenagers have sung the song with a school choir (especially the information from the guitar version above was helpfull to me).
In the meantime I have found many other versions, played by mandolin orchestra, mandolin and guitar, violin, recorder, violin.
Playlist – Yell – by Ikimono Gakari
Additional information
Wikipedia (German) about Ikimono Gakari: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikimono_Gakari
Wikipedia (Engl.) about Ikimono Gakari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikimono-gakari
Lyrics: http://www.kiwi-musume.com/lyrics/ikimonogakari/singles/yell/yell.html
Another great life video by Ikimono Gakari: http://www.wat.tv/video/ikimono-gakari-yell-from-live-3m4r5_2ey5f_.html
More posts about Japan in my blog: http://www.mandoisland.com/?tag=japan