orange pekoe -- Yawaraka na Yoru (やわらかな夜)

Supposedly there was one of those Supermoon phenomena out there last night. I took a look outside and there was something breaking or trying to break out of the cloud cover but it wasn't exactly Supermoon. It was more along the lines of Fuzzymoon and it didn't seem too big to me. 😏 No matter. There is another Supermoon heading our way next month although the folks are saying that it won't be quite as big.

Earlier this morning, the broadcast satellite wing of NHK (called NHK-BS...oh, how I laughed at that moniker when it was first introduced) had its news program in which the anchors were all gushing about Supermoon making its presence known in a number of places across Japan.

However, beyond the gushing was the background song for the feature which was orange pekoe's "Yawaraka na Yoru" (Gentle Night). Then it was the Twitter feeds crawling from right to left at the bottom of the screen that were gushing. And why not? orange pekoe came up with another gentle beauty of a song.

"Yawaraka na Yoru" is orange pekoe's 2nd single from February 2002 and unlike their debut single of "Taiyo no Kakera"（太陽のかけら）, their second entry stresses a bit more on the jazz side of things...just like Ego-Wrappin'. In fact, the melody by guitarist Kazuma Fujimoto（藤本一馬）reminded me a bit of "Waltz For Debby" by the legendary Bill Evans. Meanwhile, vocalist Tomoko Nakajima's（ナガシマトモコ）lyrics are insistent on de-stressing from the pains in life...just enjoy the evening from the veranda while sipping some milk tea. Nothing better than that during a weeknight...and perhaps the tea was orange pekoe? 😉

All in all, it's one relaxing tune. And it did even better business than "Taiyo no Kakera" by getting as high as No. 36. Both songs are on the duo's debut album "Organic Plastic Music" from May 2002.

While I'm at it, here is "Waltz for Debby". I bought a compilation disc of Bill Evans' material one day at the old Virgin Records megastore in East Shinjuku which was the very first jazz CD that I ever bought.