Mix Masters: Japan's jazz experiments with evolution

Jane Kitagawa / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

Back in 1929, Japan saw the opening of its first jazz coffee shop--a jazz kissa called the Blackbird. Like many to come, it was located across the road from a university and its purpose was to introduce its customers to foreign music. It also heralded social change, eventually offering a place for artists, students and intellectuals to meet. But ultimately, it was about the music.

"You can't write a thorough cultural history of postwar Japan without being attentive to the world of jazz," says historian and jazz pianist Mike Molasky, winner of the 2006 Suntory Prize for Arts and Letters for his book Sengo Nihon no Jazu Bunka: Eiga, Bungaku, Angura (jazz culture of postwar Japan: film, literature, the underground). He also published a book on jazz kissa, Jazu Kissaron, in February this year.

Along with many other cafes of its ilk, it continued to play a range of music until the late 1950s, when perceptions of jazz changed. At this time, the "modern" jazz kissa appeared, attracting an intellectual crowd that was more underground than mainstream.

"Between 1958 and 1961, when American jazz drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers toured with their album The Freedom Rider," continues Molasky, "the ears of students, intellectuals and artists were open for the first time, and modern jazz seemed both energetic and dynamic and refined and worthy of their own intellectual aspirations."

By 1976, there were about 500 of the jazz coffee shops in Japan. Cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto became hubs where jazz was tied to the political and artistic happenings of the time.

"The jazz kissa's popularity was partly due to the lack of high-quality performances available at the time," says Takashi Yamamoto, Disc Union jazz and DIW (Disc in the World) label director, as he recalls his days spent visiting, then working, at a jazz kissa in Meidaimae called Miles. Run by a friendly lady called Motoyama san, the cafe first opened in 1960, has a strict vinyl-only policy, and was once visited by John Coltrane.

"No radio stations were broadcasting jazz, and few people could afford imported records or audio systems. Vinyl was hideously expensive...300 dollars per record. And in the typical Japanese wooden house, it was impossible to play music loudly."

Despite the costs of the hard-to-find records, little was actually needed to start up a successful jazz kissa, according to musician Otomo Yoshihide, who recounts in his essay "Leaving the Jazz Cafe":

"2.5 [meters] by 6 meters of space. That and a pair of huge JBL or Altec speakers, a couple hundred jazz records and a bar counter were all that was necessary to open your basic jazz kissa. [They] often would be run by an arty, interesting man or woman, who would play records on their system all day long, according to their own taste...Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and sometimes Derek Bailey or Evan Parker."

While the details have since changed, the spirit has stayed much the same. There are new kissa designed to foster intellectual connections through jazz music, there are a handful of festivals and there is constant innovation.

"Kichijoji's Cafe Dzumi...the venue Offsite, that existed in Yoyogi in 2000...These places are very different to the jazz kissa of the 1970s, but they allow for a similar exchange of musical, political, cultural ideas," Otomo says. Molasky, meanwhile, has described the opening of cultural space Cafe Dzumi in 2007, which holds lectures, performances and other musical events as "the most self-conscious gesture given to kissa."

On the festival front, Jazz Art Sengawa, held in Chofu, western Tokyo, began three years ago with a strong curatorial focus on featuring local performers of free jazz and alternative improvised music to contrast with more famous events, such as the Tokyo Jazz Festival.

Also important is the curatorial crossover between jazz musicians and artists from other genres such as novelists, dancers, filmmakers, actors and poets. Poet Shuntaro Tanikawa and butoh dancer Min Tanaka appeared in the festival this year.

"The main thing is to produce a place where improvisers can gather and exchange ideas," says Koichi Makigami, the event's artistic director. "We also want to provide audiences with a different outlet to engage with jazz performance."

Makigami has instilled a similar ethos in his New Wave pop rock band, Hikashu, which caused a stir when it performed three years ago at the Tokyo Performing Arts Market's New Developments in Jazz.

With a piano, double bass, brass and percussion, and performance elements including improvisation and vocal chopping and changing, Hikashu looked no different to any jazz band at the one-stop shop for international performing arts presenters and festival producers. The event's mission had been to showcase new currents in Japanese jazz. But the band's style and use of a theremin and synthesizers left audience members wondering whether they were attending the right performance.

"The development of jazz is marked by its absorption of various traits from other musical genres. Its history is full of free and innovative changes. What is now said to be 'outside jazz' could become mainstream during the next generation," explains renowned jazz critic Teruto Soejima.

With its appearance at this year's Fuji Rock Festival, Hikashu appear to have been embraced by the mainstream. But Makigami is unsure whether the group fits into the jazz oeuvre.

"We don't fit into any particular genre," says Makigami. "We value the originality and liveliness of jazz. It's a changing concept. It's a style, but on the other hand, it's a way of thinking, and we relate to this freedom."