In 1968, Harumi released a beautifully packaged, self-titled double album, recorded by legendary producer Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground) and put out on the Verve Forecast label.
He embarked on a 15-city tour that same year, which included a performance at the grand Pasadena Civic Auditorium. It was an accomplished, auspicious debut for an essentially unknown young artist, but soon after he disappeared from the public eye. Who was he and what became of him?
It turns out that Harumi, whose full name was Harumi Ando, did indeed attend the School of Visual Arts, studying advertising from 1963 to 1965. During this time he met fellow student Sherri Baxter, who would go on to create the exquisite artwork for Harumi, on which she is credited as “Sherri Berri.” (Attempts to reach Baxter for this article were unsuccessful.) The album, a copy of which has been acquired by the SVA Archives, contains a mix of charming psychedelic pop and soft rock on two sides, and a pair of experimental tracks on the other two: a 24-minute spoken-word piece delivered by Harumi and the late William Roscoe Mercer, a.k.a. Rosko, an influential New York DJ; and the 18-minute “Samurai Memories,” which incorporates a recording of Harumi, his parents and his sister, Hisako, conversing in Japanese.
With the help of a journalist acquaintance, Willa Paskin of Slate’s “Decoder Ring” podcast, I was able to track down Harumi’s daughter, Junet, and through her his sister, Hisako. Both spoke with me and generously filled in the gaps.
The Ando family emigrated from Tokyo to Queens when Harumi was a young teen. “He always wanted to be a singer,” Hisako says. “He taught himself guitar, harmonica. He played violin, he played clarinet. The music was in his blood.”
During his teen years and early adulthood, Harumi forged a series of remarkable connections in New York City’s music scene, jamming with the likes of Richie Havens and Cat Stevens. For a period, Allan Montoya, the son of legendary flamenco guitarist Carlos Montoya, played guitar in Harumi’s band. He seemed to have a knack for meeting people: one day he came home and told his sister he’d played pool with actor Peter Falk, TV’s Columbo. Hisako recalls Rosko visiting their home in Queens to interview her, Harumi and their parents at time of the album’s release. As a Japanese American, Harumi’s mere presence on the rock scene was unusual. “In those days, you didn’t really see any Asian singers in the U.S. at all, so it was unique,” Hisako says. Her friends in California were astonished that he played at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
However, the environment of the music business took its toll, and Harumi stepped away. While he never released another album, he continued his artistic pursuits. He later attended the Germain School of Photography in Manhattan (which has since closed) and had a second career as a photo retoucher and expert in dye-transfer photographic printing, working with many commercial clients. He lived in a rent-controlled loft near the World Trade Center for more than 30 years until his death in 2007.
“9/11 impacted him greatly,” Junet says. “Our loft was just a couple blocks away. He got really involved with the community. A church nearby volunteered to help him clean the apartment because he was on the top floor. The soot that covered the city was all over his apartment as well. I know it took a toll on him because he couldn’t walk barefoot at home for over a year after the event.” When the group overseeing the World Trade Center area’s reconstruction announced a competition for a 9/11 memorial landscape design, Harumi submitted a proposal.
His was an only-in-New-York kind of life, but perhaps the most compelling part of this story is the way in which Harumi’s work has continued to resonate with subsequent generations of listeners. His fans can be found writing blog comments and Reddit posts, many of them searching for more information about the artist—information which, like more than we would like to admit, does not exist online. Sometimes, answers are contained behind paywalls of publications and research databases, but even more often they are only held by human memory.
This article also appeared in the Visual Arts Journal.