It's already Saturday April 29th in Japan so that means that the annual Golden Week holidays have begun there. Apparently all of the COVID measures have been lifted so the hordes of tourists will be engorging every source of transportation around the country. My friend will be headed to Japan himself but he's making sure that he will be avoiding Golden Week.
Anyways, let's begin Urban Contemporary Friday here on KKP with some 70s City Pop. Just by coincidence, it's almost been a year since I put up a song by Mari Kaneko & Bux Bunny（金子マリ & バックス・バニー）. The band has been categorized as a rock group and indeed Kaneko has been called the Janis Joplin of Shimo-Kitazawa (a cool bohemian neighbourhood in Tokyo), but I think that this particular song from their 1978 album "Shoot the moon" is something quite different altogether.
"Serenade" is a mostly laidback, sip-the-whiskey, sunset sort of City Pop tune of the 1970s with that characteristic haze effect on the synths, some bluesiness and comforting vocals by Kaneko. It was written by the late gospel singer Yuka Kamebuchi（亀渕友香）with melody by keyboardist and sci-fi writer Hiroyuki Namba（難波弘之）, who had also been one of the other founding members for Bux Bunny. I would love to know who was on the trumpet.
Hi there! Purplesound here; I pulled out my copy to check the liner notes and Junichi Kanezaki (of the fusion band Spectrum, whose horn section participated throughout the album) provided the trumpet solo for this track.
ReplyDeleteThanks kindly Purplesound for letting us know. I figured that it was someone pretty major behind the horn.
DeleteYou're welcome! Thanks for the post; I've followed this blog since I was a teenager so it always makes me happy when one of my videos ends up here. ^.^
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