Piper -- Summer Breeze

I had actually seen Piper（パイパー） listed in "Japanese City Pop" so I've come across Page 114 which was set aside for their albums a number of times already, but didn't listen to any of their songs until I found this article on Japanese City Pop by Anna at her site, "Appears". She referred to one of the band's summery tracks, "Ride On Seaside" which I listened to.

That song and this one, "Summer Breeze", the title track from their 2nd album in 1983, ache so much of City Pop with the light keyboards and Keisuke Yamamoto's （山本圭右）wafting vocals that I could almost see a Pina Colada with paper umbrella materialize next to my laptop. But hey, especially on a day like today here in Toronto when it's so chilly and gloomy, I can use a musical dose of sunshine.

There's very little information about Piper except from what I could get from "Japanese City Pop" and the lone English-language article on the Net, but what I could find about the band is that Yamamoto was a guitarist for a band led by singer-songwriter Kazuhito Murata（村田和人）who was associated with some of the big lights of the genre such as Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）and Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）. Murata even helped out on the chorus arrangements. That being said, I'm going with the direct quote from the article in "...that Piper was an incredibly unknown Japanese City Pop band, compared to the likes of Tatsuro Yamashita, Toshiki Kadomatsu, Epo, Sugiyama Kiyotaka...". Considering how many new faces I uncovered in "Japanese City Pop", I'm not all that surprised but it just means that there is a lot of treasure-troving for me to discover some very nice material.