Another wonderful Morricone piece. Taken from the first Dario Argento movie "L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo ", this track has all the typical Morricone trademarks of that time. The first bars of the song would easily be mistaken for an early Jobim song, kicking off with a soft bossa nova style drum pattern and accoustic guitar, but when strings and melody joins in, with lyricless la-la-la female voices, this is definitively Morricone.

This is a track of off Dearie's second Fontana album "That's Just The Way I Want To Be". An overlooked gem of a record, unusual sounding for Blossom, blending together jazz, bossa nova and folk with nicely arranged orchestration. "Sweet Surprise" has a dream-like, airy feel with it's jazzy waltz rhythm. The album is available on the japanese "Whisper for you" compilation. Unfortunately, her first Fontana album "Soon It's Gonna Rain" from 1967, featuring lots of Jobim and Bacharach songs, has yet to be released on CD.

The "Softrock Drivin'" series is a terrifically compiled collection of japanese soft rock and bossa nova gems from the late 60s/early 70s. And it clearly shows that the japanese interest in all kinds of easy listening music wasn't solely influenced by contemporaries like Burt Bacharach but by native artists as well. This track by Emma Sugimoto is a delightfully light and fluffy piece of japanese pop and sounds like a blueprint for some kind of "Shibuya-Kei" track artists like Pizzicato Five could have produced. With shimmering strings, harpiscord embellishments, slightly funky electric guitar and a wonderful trumpet on top. With the clear, transparent production and fine arrangement it's a true standout track of the series.

Fantastic piece of gentle soft rock, filled with simple and effective bittersweet lyrics. Soundwise, delicado appropriately described it in his review as a "cooler and classier take on the Chad & Jeremy sound with superior performances, songwriting and arrangements". I can absolutely subscribe to that description, the whole album is a long lost softrock gem.