Kimiko Kasai -- Melody of Love

Suruga-ya.com

 

Of course, this isn't an APB that I've occasionally called out for myself or someone who wanted to know about the identify of a singer and/or a song. I know both the singer and the song here but I'm at a loss regarding its release date. Try as I have, the song hasn't popped up on the relevant Wikipedia sites or anywhere online. I was just lucky even to find one image of the CD single.

I'm talking about "Melody of Love" by City Pop/jazz chanteuse Kimiko Kasai（笠井紀美子）. It was actually used as the campaign song for Charle Co. Ltd, a producer of women's undergarments. Kasai and her husband Richard J. Rudolph created this sultry love song that definitely has that big hint of Burt Bacharach's famous "The Look of Love" from the very first "Casino Royale" soundtrack (I recently wrote on another Bacharach-inspired J-Pop tune a few days ago) thanks to the jazzy bossa. It's very languid...maybe even a bit too languid.

"Melody of Love" first came to my ears when I heard it off of JTM's kind contribution of music that he had sent me. Intrigued by Kasai's whispery vocals and its similarity to "The Look of Love", I tried looking it up but for some reason, I couldn't find it via her J-Wiki or Wikipedia discography, and riffing through her albums didn't show anything. Perhaps Kasai treated "Melody of Love" more as her contribution to Charle and not as an official song of hers. However, since the singer stopped performing in the 1980s and her final album "KIMIKO KASAI" was released in 1990, I will use that year as a stopgap date until someone confirms or corrects me. "Melody of Love" though did show up on her 1999 BEST compilation "My Favorite Songs Vol. 1 ~ Love".