SUMMER-TIME LOVE SONG

ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Released in 1979, SUMMER-TIME LOVE SONG is a rare resort-oriented instrumental album produced by Makoto Matsushita and built around an elegant mixture of AOR, jazz fusion, bossa nova, and coastal mood music. The sequence includes familiar material such as “Theme from A Summer Place” and “Wave” alongside originals including “Surfin’ Summer ‘La Costa,’” “Harbor Lights,” “Under the Jamaica Moon,” and the title track. That mixture of standards and newly written material gives the record the feel of a carefully designed summer soundtrack rather than a conventional band album. Matsushita’s influence is fundamental: guitar, harmony, and rhythm are arranged with the same clarity that would later define his own FIRST LIGHT, while Yasuaki Shimizu and other accomplished players add fusion sophistication without disturbing the album’s relaxed surface. The production is polished but never heavy; instruments appear and disappear with unusual restraint, keeping the music open and airy. Long difficult to find outside Japan, the album later gained international attention precisely because it sits at the intersection of several collector worlds—Japanese AOR, resort music, instrumental fusion, and late-seventies studio pop.