What’s more heavenly than taking a hard-earned break? When it comes to music that embodies easygoing summer feelings, my eyes and ears turn toward something captured on More Than Paradise‘s self-titled debut.
More Than Paradise, for all intents and purposes, should be labeled a side project. Released in 1991, at the height or perhaps wane of what we now call City Pop’s original popularity, More Than Paradise tried to carve out a slice of Japanese resort music, creating an oasis for three like-minded musicians to explore musical styles that remain surprisingly popular in their homeland.
It’s in the music of Latin America and Brazil that sometime Carlos Toshiki & The Omega Tribe arranger Motoki Funayama called his friend Yudai Suzuki up about. On the phone, he proposed the idea of taking a break from his solo career to create Latin music as a hobby. Out of contract and searching for a new direction, Yudai gamely followed Funayama’s idea. It was Motoki who heard Eiko Kamata’s voice while working with her on the soundtrack to buddy-cop drama, Abunai Deka and realized that her voice was being wasted in her solo music, and that her true talent could flourish in this different kind of music. Together as a duo, they could create something different.
Taking inspiration from cumbia, salsa, and samba groups, which often feature singing male-and-female duos, the idea of another Japanese-based Latin music group made sense. The addition of freelance composer Jun Kageie made equal sense. Jun was known for myriad stylistic compositions for artists like Hiromi Go and for anime. With him this could be resort music with an added layer of sophistication only he could provide.
What made More Than Paradise’s debut so impressive was its collection of session musicians backing up the group’s ideas. Joining them for recording sessions were Casiopea’s former rhythm section of Tetsuo Sakurai and Akira Jimbo (the so-called “Jinsaku”), guitarists Koji Masuzaki and Masaki Matsubara, all known for their work on countless classic J-Jazz albums, and Brazilian songwriter Osny Melo, who’d also contribute a song to the record.
One thing I won’t belabor you with, especially this time of year, is more background than necessary. At its core, More Than Paradise is music imbued with an unapologetic turn toward summer and our coastlines. Songs like lead single “夏物語” (“Summer Story”) lean heavily into Latin-flavored music, taking genres we heard in bits and pieces on better-known City Pop classics like bossa nova, rumba, and earnest AOR, and turning them into earworms that have you looking for your best UV protection.
It’s not surprising that More Than Paradise had an accompanying LaserDisc release, seemingly lost to time, that included images of sun, sand, and assorted tropical motifs. This was music made to be played on your way to that sometimes salty surf elsewhere, or for those stuck at home, to evoke that certain somewhere. Certain songs like “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” stand out for their Polaroid-like capture of a certain Japanese cultural time and space.
As for me, personal favorites like “Champagne and Caviar,” sung by Eiko, build to wonderful grooves that are unapologetically “resort music.” Yudai and Eiko’s duet on the gorgeous electro-samba “Cancao De Coracao” evokes some of their homeland’s best Brazilian-Japanese cross-pollinated music. And what’s there to say of “Voce Me Mudou,” their take on MPB (or should I coin: MPB-J) gamely singing in Portuguese a gorgeous, sunset-inducing ballad that Djavan or Ivan Lins would have prayed for, written for them by Osny Melo. Hopefully, someone in the comments will remind me which Brazilian song this reminds me of.
The album ends on “嵐の夢” (“Storm’s Dream”), another wonderful Yudai Suzuki original much like the bulk of the record he wrote. In it you hear, it contains all these gradients of the season. Brazilians once described it as saudade; we Latinos know it as añoranza; we know it as yearning. But in this Japanese music, the record ends with setsunasa (切なさ), which we know as a love that hurts so good. Although More Than Paradise would continue for one more album before they’d call it a day, it’s their debut that speaks to the myriad feelings one can suss out of syncopating to a summer feeling. As for now, let’s luxuriate a bit, and revisit another little bit of paradise lost to the sands of time.
