As being anticipated earlier this year, a brand new Lupin the Third animated series is making its worldwide debut tomorrow, for the first time in a country that is not its creator's homelands! Let's welcome the Italian-first series debut with a proper Lupin III track.
Lupin III (ルパン三世) BraBand! Koshien (ブラバン！甲子園)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (98) | x5 (126) | x7 (244) | x9 (484) |
Taiko +
143
none
lupin3For those who are upset about the hilariously weird opening theme for the new Lupin the III series, the Taiko no Tatsujin franchise already got us covered, both with a cover version of the iconic 1978 main theme (which we already spotlighted a few months back in this corner) and with a custom arrangement of said theme for one of the Apple friendly Taiko Plus app's exclusive tracks.
This peculiar arrangement of the Lupin '78 theme is an extended version of a short arrangement that has been made by the nation-wide popular Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra (東京佼成ウインドオーケストラ, TKWO for short). The act was originally founded in 1960 by the lay Buddhist organization Rissho Kosei Kai as the Tokyo Kosei Symphonic Band, with musical direction ranging from classic vibes to modern pop/jazz vibes. The TKWO has featured many famous English maestros as main conductors, including Paul Meyer, Frederick Fennell and Douglas Bostock, with the current one (as of December 2014) being Takeshi Ooi. Since the act's founding, the huge discography and the many live performancesa across Japan has made it the most active wind orchestra of the world, with many album series ranging into several topics and genres.
One of these album series is the popular BraBand! Koshien (ブラバン！甲子園) series, started with the eponymous album released on June 27th, 2007. This series of albums features a lot of popular songs in Japanese culture being re-arranged as brass band theme songs for baseball matches, as also the albums'art visually suggest with its energetic characters. The five songs included in Taiko Plus' 2010 Brass Band Pack are all songs coming from this circle, with the Lupin III theme above coming from the second album of the series, BraBand! Koshien 2, originally released on February 27th, 2008.
This also happens to be the hardest of the Brass Band songs in the aforementioned Taiko + song pack, as the many, small BPM shifts and fluctuations along the play are charted with a barrage of clusters for one of the few Taiko +-exclusive songs that is devoid of any hitballon/drumroll markers of sorts. Like for the other 4 songs in the pack, animated characters from the BraBand! Koshien album art covers appear as custom dancers upon each play.
