The Real Title of “Jinken”

Yesterday I received an email request from an enthusiastic musician friend for the music for “Jinken,” a tune on one of my band’s CDs, Big Machine. This seems to be a perfect time (I think) to illuminate the amusing history of our recording of it as well as some history of the song itself. Here is what I replied in an email (with some editing and additions) to my friend:

Hello Richard,

As far as I remember, there were no charts for it. If I had any, I would gladly send them along to you. If I come up with anything, I’ll send it.

The idea for the tune came from Jim Rothermel who died in 2011. Jim was playing in a group at a convention cocktail event in San Francisco one night and a Japanese man who spoke very little English approached the band and asked for the “Bunny Hop” which the band dutifully played. The man said, “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” The next night he handed Jim a cassette with the tune on it and he called it what Jim thought was “Jinken.”

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember how we put the arrangement together, probably a combination of an on-the-spot working the parts out (Bob Schulz, Mike Starr and Jim were masters at that) and possibly either a lead-sheet Jim might have written out or just a chord chart. He might have played the cassette recording of it as well while we rehearsed the different sections.

As to the name of the tune on the CD, “Jinken”, was from what Jim thought the tune requester called it. It turns out that was not correct but probably close to “Jenkka” I guess. I discovered it too late to change, after the CD was produced. At that time I was working as a programmer for a software contractor company in Berkeley with a really great bunch H1B-visa Russian programmers on-site. I took the new CD to work and I was playing it for some of my colleagues to “show off” immediately after it came out. One of the project managers at our small company was a Russian woman named Sveta. She happened to be standing near my work area when “Jinken” started playing and she immediately broke into a huge grin and started dancing around. She told me that it was a tune she and basically everyone her age was taught to dance to in elementary school in the 1960s! The actual name of the tune is “Letkajenkka” by a Finnish musician/composer.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letkajenkka for history and why the Japanese fellow called it the “Bunny Hop.” [After watching some of the online videos from the mid-1960s Finland, the dance is identical to the “Bunny Hop” which was all the “rage” in the early 1950s.]

Sorry I can’t help more. At the time, I actually thought the tune was good enough to launch us into the “big time” (yea, right, like that would happen!) like what happened with the Village Stompers with “Washington Square” or Kenny Ball with “Midnight In Moscow.”

Jim was a genius, and that front line was amazing as was the rest of the band, however, no longer able to be reproduced since Bob Schulz, Jim Maihack and I are the only ones left. I just did a little tribute to Jim on my “blog” if you are interested: https://santhony.com/banjo/remembering-jim-rothermel/

Here is our version, from about 2000, of “Letkajenkka” aka “Jinken.”

The Big Machine CD is out of print and no longer available but all the tracks on all our CDs can be downloaded as zip files in MP3 format for $10 by clicking here.