City Craft -- Niji wo Kakete Miseru（虹を架けてみせる）

 

With a name like City Craft, I had been expecting something like a City Pop band with all of the punchy bass and Fender Rhodes action.

However, I found out that City Craft（シティ・クラフト）was actually more of a folk duo and that's about all I could find, despite looking through a number of sites. However, most of those sites were auction places so it was just City Craft's records that were up there for sale and pretty much bupkiss in terms of information.

All I know is that they may have been around as early as 1978 and that the lyricist and composer for this particular song "Niji wo Kakete Miseru" (I'll Build You A Rainbow), Shunichi Tomori*（戸森俊一）, may be one of the two members of City Craft. Other than that, "Niji wo Kakete Miseru" was out as a single and also as a track on their album "Kisetsufuu"（季節風...Seasonal Winds）, both of which were released sometime in 1981. Just from the basic melody, I would have pegged this one as a folk song but there was that undulating bossa nova rhythm moving it along like waves under a toy sailboat. There were also those keyboards that had me wondering whether City Craft and whoever helped arranged the song were also trying to add in some of that extra AOR juice.

If anyone out there has some extra information on City Craft, please let us know. I'd be interested in exploring these two a bit further.

*The kanji for the first name for Mr. Tomori can be read many ways but I couldn't get a definitive solution to my problem.