Coconut Crew -- Chuo Freeway（中央フリーウェイ）

I ended up listening to the entire album but my amity for "Summer Breeze" by Coconut Crew released in 1985 started with their cover of Yumi Arai's（荒井由美）classic "Chuo Freeway" at 3:10. Toronto has been starting to go back into a freezing state so listening to this bossa nova version of one of Yuming's（ユーミン）most famous creations provides some aural warmth for the soul and mind. This version is pretty short and whizzes by at a fairly quick pace, but it's the type of song that I would like to hear in a convertible as we drive along the shore in Japan or in Brazil.

Not much is written up about Coconut Crew except that according to Slap Lover Record, the group is led by one of the pioneers for Brazilian music in Japan, percussionist Kazuo Yoshida（吉田和雄）. "Summer Breeze" has some original tracks but there are also other examples of kayo kyoku given the bossa treatment such as Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）"Nagisa no Balcony"（渚のバルコニー）and Tatsuro Yamatshita's（山下達郎）"Loveland, Island". The romaji versions of the track titles can be seen at Discogs.