Careful, things are about to get soft. Now that this has been established, on to the matter at hand. The Milky Way was the name of a project by Japanese studio musicians assembled by multi-instrumentalist Makoto Matsushita. Recorded in 1979, it shows the production standard of the 1970s in its most beautiful form, sunlit and laid-back. Clean in sound, like Steely Dan, and topped off with the same laid-back groove, the compiled songs combine a very gentle fusion sound with echoes of Latin American music.
Most of them are cover versions, from Antônio Carlos Jobim’s »Wave«, with its elegantly meandering harmonies and nobly interlaced rhythms, to Boz Scaggs’ »Harbor Lights«, which spends four minutes rocking away like a yacht lying in harbour before gathering real speed once more with a samba finale, to »Surfin’ Summer ‘La Costa’« by Linda Williams and Natalie Cole, with flute intro, backing singers and wonderfully chromatic chord sequences. Matsushita’s unobtrusive voice carries the arrangements, made partly by him and partly by pianist Kazuo Nobuta, and provides additional cohesion.
For music borrowed so widely, Summer-Time Love Song feels astonishingly rounded. The whole thing is so mellowed that, for an audience with a strong appetite for adventure, it might have an effect similar to a box of chocolates eaten single-handedly. All a question of dosage. There are no serious health concerns. The record is much too good for that.
