This website is dedicated to all the jazz musicians, club owners, small label owners, managers, fans and wait staff who form the amazing world of jazz, blues and improvised music in Japan. The site is created for anyone and everyone who has an interest in good music and creative artistic expression. The site focuses on jazz in Japan, but in the broadest possible sense. No good or complete definition of jazz has ever really been established, so it's better to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Jazz means all the types of jazz, but by expanding the boundaries a bit, can also bring in blues, Latin, improvised music, and even a distinctive approach to life. This website will cover all of those.
The site offers my view of what is happening in jazz in Japan. Most of the focus is on Japanese musicians, their live performances and their recordings, but I also include interviews and other writings. Tokyo brings in a huge amount of jazz of all kinds, though, and I write about shows of foreign artists that take place in Japan as well. Jazz for me is a source of endless speculation on music and life, so I have also included a section on "Thoughts on Japanese Jazz." I read a lot about music, too, and have started to review many of the books that influence my thinking and reaction. Reading about music increases enjoyment, though it runs the risk of intellectualizing its immediate pleasure.
This website has several practical purposes. First, it is an introduction to the clubs, upcoming music, and recent CD releases. Second, it reviews live shows, which can serve as previews and as background. Lastly, the site offers new conceptions and ways of thinking about the music. Reading about music helps to increase the pleasure of it. I hope all this will give people a little push out towards the live music scene in Tokyo, which is vibrant and vast. I hope it serves as an introduction to one aspect of Japan's culture, one that goes against the stereotyped images. It will also act as a sort of gateway between Japanese culture and those interested in it, and for musicians coming here to perform their art.
As for my editorial policy, I do not write about music I feel is dull. I am not creating an encyclopedia here. I am writing about music that moves me. Listening with "big ears" is essential, but I have certain styles that I like more than others. I also feel that any style can be good, if it's good. That means, any music with organic energy and human spirit can be good, regardless of its category, sound or intention. However, I don't write about music that communicates its own desire to just make money. That would be as pointless as describing a fast food hamburger or beer made by a big company.
I do not feel it is my job here to attack poor quality music as much as it is to point out what is better and special. One of my friends teases me he is waiting for me to write a negative review someday. I simply do not write up what I do not like. Why waste space on that? That does not mean everything left out is bad. Far from it, I can't get to everything, only a small bit, and then an even smaller bit makes it into writing. In writing about music, it is a lot easier to find what is wrong than to appreciate what is right. Like the song says, "You've got to accentuate the positive/Eliminate the negative/Latch on to the affirmative/Don't mess with Mister In-Between." So much music is really "in-between." I don't mess with it.
Many websites devoted to special topics suffer from a slackness of thought and sloppiness of writing. They become mired in a defensive style of prose or jargon-laden narrowness. Many articles here stretch back eight years and were written for places that had certain demands on style. For the new articles here, I draw on the experience of having been a beginning writer, an editor, a writing teacher, an creative writer, and a music writer for many years. I hate reading bad writing myself, especially my own. The world does not need a lot more bland sentences, stilted information and tossed-off opinions; it needs strong writing, deep feeling and clear thinking. Good music deserves good writing.
While I do receive sample CDs and tickets to shows, as an independent writer, I have to spend a lot of my own money. I do not mind that, as it helps me write from the point of view of listeners. The decisions on what to include are my own. I inevitably leave out a lot of people and their music, sad to say, but the ones that are included have been chosen with a lot of care and thought and time. This site is not attempting to cover all of the jazz and improvised music in Japan. I have my prejudices, which should be evident.
However, I feel music writers should follow their instincts, at first listen at least, and try to articulate how the music moves them. A lot of music I find fascinating, but it leaves me cold. Other music takes time to understand. A lot of jazz writers strike poses to prove how hip they are, how far into free jazz they can go, or how close they are to the musicians. I find that approach to music writing pretentious. I have no particular axe to grind.Duke Ellington said there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. I stick to the good.
The ideas of jazz
I find jazz to be a metaphor that encompasses a broad section of life's best experiences. Immanuel Kant said that ethics begins in aesthetics. I could not agree more. It is not that you can judge someone's character by the type of music they like, but that beauty and character and ethical choices in life are connected at the deepest level. You are what you listen to.
Jazz, however one defines it, is based on creativity and emotion. These are not just things that happen to people, but values that artists take seriously. Real music has the power to offer not just pleasure, which is important enough, but hope, ideas and strength. By "real music" I mean music that values creativity, authenticity, artistry and a spirit of human exploration. Vital music is not an escape from the hassles of life but an artistic counterbalance that lets us return to the worst part of life refreshed and able to look at it squarely and reasonably. It is a way of re-humanizing.
Music is a kind of language that must be learned, though it is very different from spoken languages. Music expresses values, ideas, and emotions, though it is easy to misunderstand. People who listen to music that has been processed by the ProTools computer program to adjust the tone, set the rhythm and re-harmonize poor musicianship expresses more of a love of technology than of human creativity. That type of music is about predictability, not about surprise.
Music is very abstract and imprecise, and jazz is perhaps the extreme, yet that is what art is about. Sensing the musical forms and finding the meanings takes effort, though. In our consumer culture where big corporations sell easy solutions and immediate pleasures, most people are reluctant to make much effort, and prefer to just take what is promoted and stuff fast food music in their ears.
I think that jazz is difficult music in one sense, but is easy in that it is essentially improvising in the moment, an activity that people do all the time. Improvisation is the art form that is most similar to human life, though many people prefer pre-programmed emotion and corporate-determined experiences. Jazz rebels against the conformity of consumer pressures, and the effects those pressures have on our spirit.
Limitations of words
Someone said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. That is, it doesn't tell you much of value. However, the same might be said of writing about anything. Love hardly fits into words, but most of the world's stories center on that theme. Music is an art form with tremendous complexity, emotion and abstraction. Not much of the experience, frankly, fits into words. That's not a limitation of the music, but of language.
Words about music may seem futile, but they can make unnoticed connections, point out subtleties, discover what happens artistically and revel in magical moments. Even more to the point, why NOT dance about architecture? Why not respond to art with art, or at least with an essay? Miles Davis said, "The music speaks for itself." Yet, all music, all art, all life, can be re-experienced in words. That's only human.
I hope this site encourages interest in the music, which I find to be compelling and evocative. I also find it fun. It may take effort to get to clubs, especially since Tokyo offers so many attractions, but listening to live jazz in Tokyo is a potent experience in the middle of the chaos, surprise and intensity of life here. You do not need to count the number of earphones stuck in people's heads to know that music is important to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. As Nietzche said, "Without music, life would be a mistake…I would only believe in a God that knew how to dance." I hope this site, in some sense, dances.
I listened to jazz from when I was very young. I fell asleep every night with music coming up from the living room. My father had an enormous collection of records and I gradually had my own, too. I always went to the Kansas City Jazz Festival and all the music I could when I was young. Then, as I got older, I went on my own, borrowing a fake ID to get into clubs in Kansas City as soon as I could drive.
I took piano lessons for many years, taught myself the guitar, and fooled around on a few other instruments. I had great music teachers, and picked up fake books on my own to figure out how to play. I still do, but not much. I sat in with my high school jazz band, though keyboard players were numerous and high level, and jammed with friends in rock bands and upstart jazz bands, too. Mostly, though, I listened.
While studying philosophy at Brown University, I went out to hear music in Providence, which was on the tour circuit for big and small artists both, everything from Dylan to the Dead Kennedys to Albert Collins. Boston was close by, with all its many musical options, just an hour away. I went dancing every weekend. It seemed the opposite of philosophy at the time, now I'm not so sure.
New York was and is jazz heaven so the first chance I got after getting to Brown I headed down there on the train and went to the Village Vanguard to hear Phil Woods. I could barely afford the entry fee and a bottle of beer, but when Phil Woods sat down next to me during the break, I offered to buy him a drink. "No, man," he said in a gruff voice, "Thanks, but I drink here for free." We chatted for a while. Hearing him and sitting right next to McCoy Tyner's piano and creeping around the clubs was a treat. It became an addiction.
After the absurdities and indirections of graduate school, I traveled and traveled, finally ending up in Tokyo. I currently teach American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University. My seminars are on Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo and Ernest Hemingway. I teach a course in American film comedy and drama, and another in American music and art. I also teach a course in intercultural communication.
Currently, I write about Tokyo for Newsweek Japan, and about Japanese jazz for Jazz Colo[u]rs, an Italian mailzine. It's cool to read my own words in Japanese and Italian, but English isn't so bad, either. Hence, this site. In the past, I have also written for numerous magazines, newspapers and websites in Japan, each of them their own mini-drama. Lesson learned: live and burn; write the wrongs. I published a collection of my Tokyo articles in Japanese in 2006, so check out the My Other Writing section.
