Stanley Clarke and George Duke -- Sweet Baby

It is a national holiday today so as per KKP custom, we have a special holiday version of Reminiscings of Youth. I'd say this story goes back almost thirty years but when I was teaching a class in Tokyo, I recall asking the students regarding their favourite ice cream flavour (my classes were often quite whimsical). One of the students was a half-French/half-Japanese lass named Francoise who was quite popular in the group and had quite the outgoing personality. As usual, she went beyond the parameters of the question and gave us her own choice of an invented ice cream flavour. When I then asked her what she would name this new taste, she enthusiastically chirped "SWEET BABY".

Not too long after, I was at Yamano Music in Ginza doing my usual browsing of anything interesting in the CD department. I ended up purchasing the two discs making up the BRIO AOR collection, one of which had a song by a couple of musicians that I had never heard before: the late American keyboardist George Duke and American bassist Stanley Clarke, and the two of them had apparently collaborated back in 1981 through an album titled "The Clarke/Duke Project". The song from that album was the song chosen for the BRIO collection and it was called surprisingly enough, "Sweet Baby".

Yes, I will always remember Francoise and her ice cream flavour through Clarke and Duke's "Sweet Baby". For one thing, the song is probably one of the smoothest and most enjoyable AOR songs that my ears have had the honour to absorb and digest, and for another, it came out in the year that I was finally awakened to the wonders of not only Japan but also music in general. My only regret is that I hadn't discovered it back then and that I would have to wait until the end of the century to finally know about it. And who would have thought that an AOR tune would invite an electric sitar into the mix? To finally reach full circle, I would love to encounter an ice cream at a parlor somewhere that was actually called Sweet Baby.

"The Clarke/Duke Project" came out in April 1981, so let's find out what else came out that month in Japan. 

Toshiyuki Nishida -- Moshimo Piano ga Hiketanara（もしもピアノが弾けたなら）

Hitomi Ishikawa -- Machibuse（まちぶせ）

Saki Kubota -- Orange Airmail Special