Forty six yea­­­rs after I first heard it, I finally found the composers and the group which played a tune I first heard as a college student in Zamboanga City and decided then and there, this was going to be played during my wedding in the future.  

Sweet Summer Love” is the 2nd cut in Side 2 of that seminal vinyl LP “Various -Non Stop Instrumental Hits” we all knew as “Bimbo Jet” which is the name of the French Band which gave us the world wide hits “El Bimbo” and “La Balanga”.

For a long time, I was veered off tangent searching for the “Sam Clayton Band” to which the tune was credited and followed up “Sam Clayton” to the USA through the internet with no success.

Just today, I took a long hard look at the song credits listed here at discogs.com and finally found the composers.

Jean Claudric (real name:  Jean-Claude Aron Bacri) was a French arranger and conducted born in Algiers in 1930. He worked with many of the greats in French light entertainment music, notably Enrico Macias, Charles Trenet, and Mireille Mathieu. He was also involved as an arranger and conducted in the Eurovision Song Contest on multiple occasions and for various countries (including the first and only Morrocan participation in 1980.) It turns out Sam Clayton was one of his many aliases and he was in fact the Sam Clayton for whom I had been searching for so long.

Listed as his collaborator was Michaële (born Jacqueline Deferreiromizar a.k.a. Jacqueline Misrahi, also a French songwriter who was born in Alexandria, Egypt in September 1942 who is best known for having written the lyrics of “Paroles…Paroles…” and “Gigi l’amoroso”.

Michaële made her debut on stage as the opening act for several big stars ( Enrico Macias , Gilbert Bécaud , Richard Anthony and Serge Lama ) but, suffering from stage fright , she decided to stick to songwriting.

She meets Paul & Lana Sebastian and opened her own publishing company, Boona Music. Arlette Tabart later joined thr new company whose head office is located in Claude Carrère ‘s offices . Over the years, other authors will join her: Jeff Barnel , Gilbert Sinoué and Gabriel Yared .

Thank you Jean Claudric and Michaële for sharing “Sweet Summer Love” with the world. We played it as my wife’s wedding march during our church wedding on April 20, 1985. We are forever grateful.

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