Sunburst -- Sunburst（サンバースト）

 

Last Friday, I posted an article of The Square's "Mr. Coco's One", the first track on their 1979 album "Make Me a Star" and at around the same time, I noticed that I had also bookmarked a song by this other fusion band but decided that instead of jamming the two of them into one Friday, I would wait a week to bring Sunburst over.

And that's right. The band was known as Sunburst which may have been far less known as The Square or Casiopea but was also capable of bringing the groovy and summer fusion. They had a self-titled album in 1980 and that may have been it for Sunburst because judging from the star lineup in the band, they were probably too busy with solo projects and other collaborations to hold the group together. We are talking about saxophonist Toshiyuki Honda（本多俊之）who I've written about before and one of guitarist Kazumi Watanabe's（渡辺香津美）acolytes, Yuji Karaki（唐木裕史）, along with drummer Keiji Kishida（岸田恵士）.

The first song on "Sunburst" is in fact the title track itself and right from Note One, we've got some major shuffle-worthy tropical fusion deserving of a conga line and many cocktails. Honda takes lead right from the get-go before passing it off to Karaki, and the whole theme is having fun on the beach or on the Lido Deck of a cruise liner.