Akemi Kakihara -- Taiyo no Shita de（太陽の下で）

 

And once again, welcome to another end of the work week here on KKP which means that it's Urban Contemporary Friday on the blog. It seems as if here in Toronto, we're enjoying those warm days but the nights are getting cooler which is normal for us, and the beginning of next week will be having highs just in the low 20s Celsius. So autumn is just around the corner.

It's been a while since we've had singer-songwriter Akemi Kakihara（柿原朱美）so it's nice to have her back. I consider her to be one of those artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s responsible for some very comfortable light pop of the time. I can put her beside singers such as Miki Imai（今井美樹）, Midori Karashima（辛島美登里）and Akiko Kobayashi（小林明子）, and so it's not surprising that Kakihara, or ak as she's been known for the past several years, has contributed a lot of her songs to Imai.

In June 1994, the singer came out with her sixth album "Taiyo no Shita de" (Under the Sun), and the first track happens to be the title track. Written and composed by her, I can't say that it's a City Pop, AOR or an R&B tune but it still has plenty of urbaneness and urbanity with a bit of bossa nova sprinkled into it. The marvelous sax solo in the middle lifts "Taiyo no Shita de" into sophisticated pop territory. I can also imagine Imai herself covering this one.