Kaori Kuno -- Tender Love

 

Welcome to the final month of 2023 and at least in my neck of the woods, it's come in rather dreary and wet. Not particularly Xmas-y but at least the temperatures are high enough that I can get away going out and not having to pull on the longjohns. 

It is also Urban Contemporary Friday here on KKP so why not get the ball rolling with an atypical instrumental via singer-songwriter and saxophonist Kaori Kuno（久野かおり）. "Tender Love" is the final track on her 1992 album "Concord" and I recall mentioning this album several months earlier when I posted the most recent Kuno article for another track "Elevator Lover".

Mind you, it's not a total instrumental since there are those tender chorus voices by Joey Johnson and Wornell Jones soulfully oozing out the title but otherwise, it's Kuno on the sax tootling some of that soothing City Pop or light pop arrangement while Fumio Nishiyama provides the jazzier sequences on his guitar. Hironori Kouki is listed in the explanation underneath the video as the synthesizer operator, and I'm always going to be a sucker of that particular type of keyboard playing from the late 1980s going into the early 1990s.