Michiko Yoshino – vocals Toshiyuki Daitoku – piano Mark Tourian – bass Shuichiro Ise - trumpet
Michiko Yoshino and band fit perfectly into the space of Jazz Club Klavier. Both band and bar are warm, sensitive and intimate. Yoshino’s vocals were as beautiful as ever, though her most recent CD is now several years ago. Listening to this evening’s performance to a full, friendly audience, it would seem clear her next recording should not be too far away.
The Tokyo Kinema Club was packed for the latest semi-annual concert from Kikuchi’s fabulously popular and energetic Dub Sextet. Few jazz musicians can pull in as big a crowd as Naruyoshi Kikuchi, and fewer still for the right reasons, as he does. The strangely converted dance club he chose to play felt more like a set from a David Lynch movie than a traditional jazz place. However, it was a good, big space to let the large crowd stand and dig the new style jazz of the sextet.
As the world economy continues to spiral downward, jazz fans in Japan worry that jazz may be one of the ‘luxuries’ to be sacrificed. Though Japan’s jazz fans are passionate, their enthusiasm may not be enough to keep jazz afloat in the current economic storm. Like jazz scenes elsewhere around the world, Japan’s situation may be reaching a crisis point, or more hopefully, a tipping point from which new directions and conditions will emerge.
Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world. The cost for everything from melons (20,000 yen for the best) to apartment rentals (six months rent in advance) can make you wince with economic pain. Jazz in Tokyo is not cheap. The old joke about the jazz promoter who, after five years, made a million dollars in jazz (the punch line is: he started out with two million!) applies equally well to jazz fans in Tokyo.
Japan is a country where people not only love to listen to jazz; they love to read about it as well. Bookstores dot every corner of Tokyo and other major cities, and the music section is crowded with people standing and reading any time of the night or day with jazz magazines in hand. Near the racks of CDs in every jazz CD store, you can find another shelf filled with magazines, guidebooks, histories, CD rating books, and ‘mooks’ a hybrid of ‘books’ and ‘magazines,’ all about jazz.
Recording companies are the pleasure, and the frustration, of the jazz scene in Japan. The larger Japanese music companies have pretty much abandoned all jazz except "sure things." Like nature, though, the jazz world "abhors a vacuum," so many small labels fill in by working hard to bring out progressive, intriguing music on their specialty labels. The music captured by these small labels keeps the jazz scene alive. Most of the creative musicians in Japan are being recorded on these small labels. Their originality, diversity and approach is appreciated and followed carefully in this country of devoted jazz maniacs. The small recording companies do a remarkable job of finding the best talent in the primarily Tokyo-based jazz world. Many musicians are able to record every couple years, regardless of the financial resources.
All over the world, the human scale of jazz makes it special and unique, but that human scale is done with special passion in Japan, a country where small is beautiful. Jazz fits the cultural sensibility perfectly, the best evidence of which are the small labels that have taken up the big challenge promote specialty jazz.
More surprising than a CD of enka songs done up in jazz flavors is the lack of CDs of enka songs. The Great American Songbook from which almost all jazz derived its repertoire bears great similarities to enka music, with themes of fate, pride, romance and its many failures and that deep longing for the past. The standards of jazz were mostly originally drenched in sugary popular styles, from which jazz re-worked them into more sophisticated forms. That Japanese jazz musicians have largely ignored the tremendous body of Japanese popular songs is a subject sad enough for its own enka song.
Umezu, thankfully, restores enka to its rightful place as essential to the Japanese jazz psyche. He takes the songs and single-handedly, or rather single-reed-ily, re-creates them from other musical points of view. And if one thing can be said about Umezu, it’s that he has no shortage of points of view. This isn’t just jazz and isn’t just enka, but a marvelous new combo of musical directions. Who will follow him up? Why not more? These songs are just aching to be played as jazz. Umezu leaps in to their complicated interiors, finds the thematic nuances, follows the emotional tangles and turns them into very intriguing new works.
May 19, 2009
Tokyo Kinema Club
More surprising than a CD of enka songs done up in jazz flavors is the lack of CDs of enka songs. The Great American Songbook from which almost all jazz derived its repertoire bears great similarities to enka music, with themes of fate, pride, romance and its many failures and that deep longing for the past. The standards of jazz were mostly originally drenched in sugary popular styles, from which jazz re-worked them into more sophisticated forms. That Japanese jazz musicians have largely ignored the tremendous body of Japanese popular songs is a subject sad enough for its own enka song. 