Hi-Fi Set -- School Band no Onna no Ko（スクールバンドの女の子）

Found something nice and Long Island lounge-y through one of the "Light Mellow" series of CDs the other day. The vocal group Hi-Fi Set（ハイ・ファイ・セット）has had a fair number of its songs included onto the various albums, and it's no surprise. Especially when it comes to their 70s material, Junko Yamamoto（山本潤子）, Toshihiko Yamamoto（山本俊彦）and Shigeru Okawa（大川茂）and their harmonies have always seemed to bring that need to relax and nurse a Chablis.

And so it is with "School Band no Onna no Ko" (School Band Girl), a track from Hi-Fi Set's July 1979 7th album "Flash"（閃光）, about a young girl who apparently follows the boy of her dreams into the school band. From the harmonic give-and-take between Junko and I'm assuming her husband Toshihiko, it looks like the pairing worked between the flautist and the trumpeter.

Considering the title, I couldn't help but be reminded of the anime "Hibike! Euphonium". If the show had been created a few decades earlier, would it have had a similar story with the Hi-Fi Set song as the theme? I think folks would have been quite impressed by having such an AOR tune as an anison, but I'm just fantasizing here. Anyways, "School Band no Onna no Ko" goes down smooth, and it's certainly the mellowest song I've ever heard regarding anything to do with school.

Words and music were by Ken Gibson with Mami Kikuchi（菊地まみ）providing the Japanese lyrics.