Amerigo Gazaway is an artist who has spent most of career between Nashville and The Bay. While he is probably best known for his mash up projects, pairing together artists such as Lauryn Hill and Nina Simone or De La Soul and Fela Kuti, Gazaway has been making original projects as well. For example, last October, he gave us an instrumental project called Seasons: Shades of Autumn. Now he’s back with a project for those hot summer nights, City Hop.

The name of this album comes from Gazaway’s entry point into this music, which was marrying together Japanese City Pop and old school hip hop. For those not familiar with City Pop, it refers to a period in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when Japanese pop music incorporated a lot of western influences, such as funk, disco, R&B, AOR, soft rock, and boogie. The result was a really smooth and breezy sound. The interesting thing here is that when Gazaway takes that as a building block and starts incorporating old school hip hop production, you end up with a sound that feels like Dam Funk making yacht rock. Putting all that aside, when you just listen to this album at face value, what you have is music that sounds light, smooth, warm, and with just enough funk to get your head bobbing and your toes tapping. Gazaway also does a great job of giving you some well developed melodies that really carry these instrumental tracks, making them much more memorable in the process. It’s an album that is going to sound great on those summer days when you don’t have much to do and you just want to be at peace and relax for a minute.

City Hop is yet another interesting and solid project from Amerigo Gazaway. He continues to find interesting points of inspiration for his projects, and this is no exception. It’s a really engaging and fun listen from start to finish.