J-Jazz Down the Stairs
Down in the basement and right at home
When I first came to Tokyo, I was overwhelmed by the one-two punch of culture shock and “megalopolis shock.” To me, Tokyo was a blur of fast-walking people, confusing spaces and unfamiliar customs. Though I had traveled a lot and lived in other cities, Tokyo operated at another level of intensity altogether. I didn’t believe I could ever fit into the huge, faceless flow of already decided lives here.
During that first year of confusion, while aimlessly wandering the city after work one night, I came across an interesting sign on a side street of Shinjuku. Half in romaji, the sign led me down some ratty stairs into the unkempt basement of a tall building. I pushed open a massive heavy door and entered a small, dark, smoky room. Immediately, I felt at home: it was a jazz club.
Jazz clubs have a simple universality: stage, seats, and a bar. The band was playing fast bebop, tough music to play, but the flow of familiar sounds pouring over me in the dark comforted me in a way nothing else in Tokyo had. It seemed to reorder the city’s chaos. “Cool,” I thought, “Tokyo’s a jazz city! All right.” This realization felt like I was slipping into a soft pair of old jeans, since all my life I had always gone to jazz clubs wherever I was.
At the club, I picked up flyers and info sheets, and puzzled out the kanji that led me to other clubs, jazz kissa and CD stores. I started going more and more often and started to see the same people at different clubs. A few spoke some English, and the others put up with my bad Japanese. Tokyo is so huge and populated that you might NEVER see the same human being twice in your entire life, but little by little the city began to resolve into recognizable, friendly faces who greeted me, “Hey, Michael san! Hisashiburi, man!”
Their stories fit no stereotypes. Customers were young and old, men and women. One club owner toured New York jazz clubs every year finding talent to invite over to Tokyo. One record producer spent half the year in Europe, recording and producing CDs, then the other half back in Tokyo promoting them. One customer shyly showed me his personal photos—not of his family but of his vinyl record collection! Tokyo became a city filled with interesting individuals, not just grey buildings and faceless bodies.
Musicians, too, had an easy manner and a sense of humor honed at clubs night after night. One night while chatting with nearby customers at a very small club during the break, I introduced my wife who is from China to one of the musicians. After the break, the sax player started the next set with the classic tune “A Slow Boat to China” in her honor. Everyone cracked up.
One musician lived in Greenwich Village for years, at first busking in New York’s parks and street corners, then finally getting gigs at clubs. Several studied music in America, one learned percussion in Cuba, and another was translating a jazz music theory book. “I worked at a bank for five years…” one saxophonist told me shaking his head and laughing, “But I finally escaped.” “My father was a salaryman, so I chose another route,” a pianist confessed, revealing a little of the pain of escaping expectations to follow a true passion.
It was easy to talk with these jazz people. In a city filled with tatemae of all sorts, these jazz people had almost no pretense. It was a relief. It wasn’t just me, I realized, that was a bit overwhelmed by Tokyo and needed a place to go, but everyone else as well. We weren’t just jazz fans, but fellow refugees from Tokyo’s hectic, stressful life.
In the dark of the club, the spontaneity and energy of jazz can wash away the goals and dictates of Tokyo life. From the viewpoint of Tokyo’s jazz world, I could see that Tokyo life is built of pre-set forces and rigid demands, but that it also encourages a constant improvising of new melodies of living. I learned that Tokyo life is like one great, long jazz solo, and for me, that made perfect, and comforting, sense.
(May, 2008, originally published in Japanese in Newsweek Japan)