Kiyotaka Sugiyama & Omega Tribe -- Transit in Summer

 

KKP co-administrator and good friend Larry should have left Toronto yesterday and arrived back in California, but I still worry about the chaos at Pearson Airport. Have the lineups that have probably been longer than the ones for "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back" combined been alleviated a little bit? I will have to send him an email to make sure.

A transit in summer should never be that difficult. Oh, what a segue! I have here "Transit in Summer",  which belongs to Kiyotaka Sugiyama & Omega Tribe's（杉山清貴&オメガトライブ）very first album from September 1983 "Aqua City", just like its lead track "Summer Suspicion", which was the very first article for the band on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" that I ever wrote back in June 2012.

Written by Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）and composed/arranged by City Pop maestro Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）, it's the typically smooth and genteel Omega Tribe tune under Sugiyama's charge. The bass is there, all of those wonderful keyboards are there, and Sugiyama's velvet voice is of course there. In fact, the only things missing are the suitcase and passport to take all of us to a tropical paradise. And through Akimoto's lyrics are a young couple waiting in an overly air-conditioned airport as they wait for their flight down to their vacation destination. Obviously, the man and woman there are having far less consternation than their real-life counterparts at Pearson.