Blue Kissa: Coffee, Jazz and Cultural Improvisation

Published in Nikkei Asia 5/1/2022

It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, but it might as well be around midnight. I’m sitting in a basement room in the Yotsuya area of Tokyo, sipping strong black coffee and listening to an obscure 1986 album by tenor sax player Chico Freeman called The Pied Piper.

I know that because the LP cover is propped up in a place where I and all the other customers can see it – right in front of the booth housing the sound system.

Nobody’s talking. In fact, you’re not allowed to talk. You’re here to listen.

The establishment I’m patronizing is called Eagle, and it is one of Japan’s oldest jazz kissas, founded by the current proprietor, Masaharu Goto, in 1967. Kissa, or kissaten, means a coffee shop in Japanese, and a jazz kissa is a place where you go to drink coffee and listen to jazz.

Naturally, this being Japan, it’s not as simple as that. Starbucks and other chain operations like Doutor, its domestic rival, do not come into the kissa category. The word, which goes back 800 years, originally meant “sipping tea” and retains some echoes of Japan’s sophisticated tea tradition.

In her book Coffee Life in Japan, anthropologist Merry White compares a kissaten master to a sushi chef. “The coffee performer commands attention, demonstrates authority,” she writes. “Coffee making, like so many practices, is both art and craft in Japan, and the master behind the counter is producer, craftsman and artist all at once”.

So nothing like the chirpy barista who hands over your Frappuccino Grande.

Put together the “Way of Coffee” with the “Way of Jazz” and you have a distinctly Japanese cultural phenomenon. Both these emblems of the modern took off in Japan in the opening decades of the 20th century. White recounts how Paulista, a Japanese-Brazilian venture, became the world’s first international coffee chain by opening a café in Shanghai in 1911. Its domestic outlets were already wildly successful. At its peak, the Ginza outlet alone served 70,000 customers a month. It is still in business today.

The pioneer of Japanese jazz is usually considered to be the Hatano Orchestra, which was a fixture on cruise ships criss-crossing the Pacific from 1913. By the early 1920s, jazz was flourishing in the dancehalls of Osaka and Kobe, thanks to acts like Ichiro Ida and his Laughing Star Jazz Band.

Coffee and jazz came together with the founding of Blackbird, Japan’s first jazz kissa, in 1929. Situated close to Tokyo University, it played music by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other big names on an Electrola, an American phonograph that cost considerably more than a Ford automobile. It was the ideal venue for aficionados – mostly intellectuals and wealthy bohemians – to listen to the acknowledged masters of the new genre.

Jazz, the enemy’s music, was shut down during the war, though some resilient musicians added Asian touches and patriotic lyrics and kept on swinging. In the 1950s, jazz became immensely popular, with highly accomplished Japanese practitioners, such as Sadao Watanabe and Toshiko Akiyoshi, appearing on the scene.

Tours by leading American musicians, such as Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers in 1961, fuelled the boom. Goto-san, the master of Eagle, became a dedicated jazz fan after being thunderstruck by a Roland Kirk gig in which the blind saxophonist played several instruments simultaneously.

Economic factors made the 1960s the heyday of the jazz kissa. According to Katsumasa Kusunose, a jazz kissa devotee, an imported record cost 3,000 yen at a time when the monthly salary of an office worker was 20,000 yen. A cheaper option was to request one side of the latest Sonny Rollins LP at a jazz kissa for the price of a cup of coffee. Occasionally, fistfights would break out when conversations, or even the rustling of newspapers, disturbed the precious listening experience – hence the introduction of the “no chatting” rule.

My fellow listeners at Eagle today don’t look like they are about to start a punch-up. Middle-aged men and young women, some leafing through jazz magazines and books from the bookshelves, they are all hard-core fans of the music. These days, only about 3% of Japan’s 600 jazz kissas retain the “no chatting” rule, according to Kusunose-san, and even in Eagle it only applies to daytime “kissa” hours. In the evening the bar is open for business. Goto-san, also a noted jazz critic with 20 books to his name, hosts regular lectures on Saturdays.

I am enjoying the Chico Freeman album – later I find out that a second hand CD version costs $65 from Amazon marketplace – but is that because of the excellence of the musicians and the compositions or because of the quality of the sound?

For the other crucial element of any great jazz kissa is the equipment. At Eagle, sunk into the back wall are two enormous, studio-class JBL4344 loudspeakers. JBL is the trademark of a high-end audio company founded by inventor James Bullough Lansing. In the jazz kissa world, the name is as almost iconic as Miles Davis.

Goto-san spent a long time experimenting with his sound system. Some combinations of equipment suited hard bop music, but did not work well with the electro-funk of Weather Report or the slow, quiet style typical of Germany’s ECM jazz label. Eventually, he settled on his current set-up.

The results speak for themselves. The texture of the sound is extraordinary. You can hear the drummer’s softest brushstroke, every hiss of his cymbal. Listening to music in Eagle is a totally different experience from streaming Spotify on your mobile phone –  as different as dinner at Jiro’s famed sushi restaurant is from a Filet-O-Fish snack at McDonald’s.

As is the custom, the master will play one complete side of the record, then reverently lift it off the turntable and replace it with another, using his feel for music and the mood of his customers to make the selection.

Jazz kissas have moved with the times, quite literally. Dug, which was established in 1961, has relocated several times in and around the pulsing heart of Shinjuku. It is still owned by its legendary founder, Hozumi Nakadaira  – also a celebrated photographer who snapped, amongst many others, John Coltrane at the Newport Jazz Festival and Thelonious Monk wandering the backstreets of Tokyo.

In the evening, Dug becomes a bar offering 100 kinds of cocktail and 50 kinds of spirits to elevate the mood and improve the music. Haruki Murakami, who in his pre-fame days was the proprietor of a jazz kissa called Peter Cat, featured Dug in his breakthrough novel, Norwegian Wood.

According to a recent article in the British hipster magazine Far Out, “audiophile bars – or listening bars if you prefer – have their origin in Japan following the Second World War… in recent years, the concept has been adopted by industrious music heads all over the world, and today you can find audiophile bars everywhere from London to India.”

Amongst its top ten choices are venues in Naples, Sao Paolo and Goa. Several emphasize their Japanese provenance by serving sushi, sake and expensive Japanese whiskeys. Strictly speaking, this is totally inauthentic; their Japanese role models offer toasted sandwiches or pizza, like the one I ate at Eagle, and Western alcoholic drinks.

But the history of jazz and the much longer history of coffee consist of rule-breaking, experimenting, repurposing and remaking. In other words, the jazz kissa concept is itself in the process of being re-imagined and transformed in a global context. Long may such cultural improvisation flourish。