Published in Nikkei Asia 28/12 /2022
“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it again”.
So said ground-breading jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy at the end of his final album “Last Date”, recorded in 1964. Many decades later and half a world away, his comment can be found inscribed on the coasters used at Tokyo jazz club B-Flat.
Of course music can be recorded, streamed from a phone etc. but that is not the same as attending a live performance, particularly in the case of improvised music like jazz, which has been dubbed ‘the sound of surprise’.
The experience is not purely auditory. Also important are the expressions on the faces of the musicians, the response of the audience, the smell of curry or pizza, the clink of glasses, the hum of traffic, the sense of being part of a temporary community made up of music lovers, staff – often music lovers too – and band members.
Such moments are unique and transient, as are the musicians themselves, as are all of us. Akira Suzuki, the owner-manager of B-Flat, probably had that in mind when he had the coasters designed.
B Flat in Akasaka, Tokyo
Suzuki-san was born in Hokkaido. When in high school, he and his girlfriend attended a concert by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It was a transformative event, preparing him and Chie, who he later married, for a lifelong fascination with the music. Much later, his best friend from school quit a job in the financial industry to start a jazz club. When the friend passed away in 2004, Suzuki-san took over. Times were often hard, but somehow he kept the music flowing and spirits high all through the Covid era.
Now Suzuki-san has gone too, knocked over by a taxi near the club on a rainy night. On a late November afternoon, friends, family and musicians gathered at B-Flat to bid him farewell. Reminisces were exchanged, some slides were shown and then there was an hour of live music featuring some of Japan’s best players.
What happens to the club remains uncertain, and that is a serious matter for many musicians and fans. For B-Flat is one of the few jazz spots in Tokyo spacious enough to accommodate a full Big Band. Indeed, several Big Bands consider it their home territory and play there on a regular basis. And Big Bands occupy a special place in Japan’s musical culture.
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Pianist Junko Moriya knows all about Japanese Big Bands. A major figure in the world of Japanese jazz, she has been leading the Junko Moriya Orchestra, for over twenty years and has released six Big Band albums. In 2005 she became the first Asian and the first woman to win an award at the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute competition (now the Herbie Hancock Institute), taking the prize for jazz composition.
Moriya is also an educator, teaching jazz in two universities and, on one occasion, taking a middle school Big Band to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival. The economics of professional musicians grow ever more challenging, yet in her view college and amateur Big Bands are thriving as never before. Opportunities to play in public have increased as municipalities arrange various commerce-boosting street events. “Even in regions with populations of just 30,000 or 40,000 there are big bands playing to a good standard,” she says.
Is there something in Japanese culture that explains the appeal of Big Bands? Junko Moriya believes so. It is a group activity of the kind that many Japanese relish, with sixteen or more members functioning as a single unit with a single purpose. Social bonds are strengthened by lengthy practice sessions. In contrast, a quartet puts much more onus on the individual.
Her opinion is echoed by Shigenobu Mori, who runs the Someday jazz club. There he has hosted an annual festival featuring the cream of Japan’s Big Bands for forty years. The amateur big band phenomenon “reflects a desire for cooperation and comradeship,” he believes. It can take on the character of a lifetime hobby, with members who started playing in school or college continuing into their 70s and 80s.
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Japan’s fascination with jazz in almost as old as jazz itself. In his book “Blue Nippon”, Professor E. Taylor Atkins of Northern Illinois University notes that the first mention of the word “jazz” in a Japanese text came in 1920 “in a sheet music periodical featuring a photo of four men posing with drums, guitar, violin and banjo, with the caption ‘Tokyo Jazz Band’”.
By the middle of the decade, the Dotonbori area of Osaka was renowned for its dancehalls featuring bands such as Ichiro Ida’s Cherryland Dance Orchestra. By the end of the decade, jazz kissa (“jazz coffee houses” where records are played) were springing up and Japanese record companies were putting together studio orchestras like the Nippon Columbia Jazz Band.
In Atkins’ words, during the interwar period “jazz was not merely a music to be accepted or reviled, but rather a metaphor for Japan’s participation in global cultural trends.” That helps to explain the explosive popularity of jazz in the post-war period. The rejection of “global cultural trends” in favour of nativism had taken Japan to the brink of national destruction. In the post-war period, listening to jazz was not just an enjoyable experience. It put you back on the right side of history.
When artists such as Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers started to tour Japan in the 1960s, they received much greater acclaim than they were used to back home in the United States. Even after the rise of rock and pop music had squeezed the jazz economy, Japan’s jazz generation remained true to its heroes. Figures like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis were selling out Japanese concert halls at a time when such a celebrated musician as McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s erstwhile pianist, was contemplating taxi-driving to make ends meet.
American Big Bands, with their challenging logistics and high costs, were particularly vulnerable to the colder economic climate of the 1970s, and the musicians and their audiences were ageing too. In Japan, though, there was a flowering of creativity amongst the larger formations. Particularly noteworthy are the two collaborations between contemporary music composer Shuko Mizuno and Toshiyuki Miyama’s New Herd – Jazz Orchestra ’73 and Jazz Orchestra ’75 – both discs being released on the legendary Three Blind Mice label.
Miyama began his career aboard the warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, playing martial music in the brass bands. His band’s artistic highlight was the challenging material provided by Mizuno and subsequent collaborations with adventurous young jazzers like pianist Masahiko Sato and drummer Masahiko Togashi.
They, together with New Herd guitarist and composer Kosaburo Yamaki, were leading lights in the “Wa jazz” movement which sought to bring pre-modern Japanese music, sounds and ideas into the mix. Traditional Japanese music of all kinds could sound “avant garde” in Western terms, as Sato showed with a spectacular live concert featuring a jazz group and one thousand chanting Buddhist monks.
Another famed Big Band brought Japanese instruments and musical themes into its repertoire. Toshiko Akiyoshi was Japan’s best known jazz musician of the post-war era, having been discovered by Oscar Peterson performing in a Ginza coffee house. She became the first Japanese to study at the Berklee School of Music and a regular on the New York jazz scene, playing with greats such as Charles Mingus.
With her husband Lew Tabackin, she launched a Big Band which was to top the poll of the prestigious Downbeat magazine many times and garner a string of Grammy nominations. Japanese themes were there from the start, in 1974. Their first album, Kogun (“One Man Army”), referred to Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued to patrol a remote island in the Philippines thirty years after the end of the war.
Though based in Los Angeles, the band was a frequent visitor to Japan and continued to weave Japanese motifs into the music, with Tabackin mimicking shakuhachi (traditional bamboo flute) cadences with his flute.
“At first I was worried that Japanese audiences would be critical,” he recalls, “but they liked it.” They still do. On a recent visit to Tokyo, he played an extended ‘shakuhachi’ improvisation, as well as his fun tribute to the jazz club that hosted him – “B-Flat, Where It’s At”.
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It was in the early 1970s that a vital support for Japan’s Big Band culture came into being. Yamano Gakki (Yamano Music) is Japan’s most prestigious music-related business. Founded in 1892 with the idea that “music is a universal language that connects people”, in its stores it sells all kinds of musical instruments, sheet music and recorded music, as well as offering classes.
For the past fifty years, Yamano has held a Big Band contest for students. It is to jazz what the “Koshien” high school tournament is to baseball, which is to say that the practice sessions are long and arduous, the competition is fierce and many dream of becoming stars.
Some have succeeded. Over the years, more than 70,000 musicians have taken part in the Yamano competition and over a hundred have become professionals. Others join one of the amateur Big Bands that proliferate all over Japan. A few take jobs at Yamano itself. Several of the company’s senior executives are ex-contestants and continue to play frequently.
Some of the student Big Bands have an even longer history. Waseda University’s famed High Society Orchestra started off in 1955 and has many distinguished alumni, including Junko Moriya. Today, the repertoire consists of classics by Duke Ellington and Count Basie and also compositions by contemporary artists like bassist Christian McBride and Israeli saxophonist Eli Degibri.
In former times, the ethos was hierarchical and tough, with younger members being at the beck and call of the seniors. Today, with a society-wide awareness of “power harassment” (bullying), the mood is more relaxed. Even so, the musicians rehearse for three hours three days a week, and in advance of the Yamano contest they seclude themselves in a countryside training camp where they do nothing but practice morning to night for five days.
Japan’s jazz ecosystem contains a great variety of Big Bands. There are bands that reverently reproduce the music of Buddy Rich or, going further back, Harry James. There are Latin Jazz Big Bands, funk Big Bands and uncategorisable Big Bands like Makoto Ozone’s No Name Horses and Jonathan Katz’s Tokyo Big Band, which includes several expat musicians as well as top level Japanese players.
Special mention should be made of three avant garde Big Bands. They will not be everybody’s cup of green tea, but they are certainly adventurous and original.
The oldest is Shibusa Shirazu, which means “never be cool”. Taking inspiration from Japan’s underground theater of the 1970s, the band cooks up a stew of free jazz, rock, Latin and street music that went down well when they played the UK’s Glastonbury Festival in 2016. Unusually for a Big Band, the solos are often quite lengthy – sufficiently so that in a recent performance at the Pit Inn jazz club, leader Daisuke Fuwa had ample time to use the restroom.
“Even though musicians play the same notes, each sound has a totally different colour,” he declares. “And it creates music that is utterly unique and will never be played again.”
Yoshihide Otomo’s Special Big Band (the very first image above) comes roaring at you with instrumentation that includes accordion, marimba, ‘sine waves’ and Otomo’s wild guitar, as well as the usual Big Band sections. Starting his career as assistant to free jazz pioneer Masayuki Takayanagi, Otomo has a melodic side to him too and scored an unlikely hit with the theme for a TV drama series.
Satoko Fujii has run several Big Bands in Japan and overseas, with the Satoko Fujii Orchestra Tokyo being her main project currently. Imagine a soundtrack to the rough antics of the gods back in the dawn of time and you have some idea of what to expect.
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Back in B-Flat, there is good news for musicians and fans. It seems that Yamano Gakki is going to take the club over in order to support Japan’s Big Bands. As Eric Dolphy said, you can’t recapture the music that has gone, but the air should soon be full of new sounds.