I Went to a Local Jazz Bar in Japan.

Last weekend evening I was invited out and paid my first visit to a local jazz bar called AU LAPIN AGILE. It is a small place where you can enjoy intimate live jazz while savouring creative cuisine and cocktails made by the owner, who was formerly a chef at a traditional Japanese restaurant.

I feel as though I find myself going to classical concerts fairly regularly one way or another, but hearing live jazz this close up was, if I am being honest, something I had never experienced before at this point in my life. It was a performance in a tiny bar with seating for perhaps a handful to a dozen or so people, which meant a genuinely hot session playing out right in front of the audience. The group that evening was a trio called Gokigen Jazz, and they performed several numbers — mostly standards that even someone like me, who rarely listens to jazz, could recognise to some degree. The upright bass playing by jazz bassist Ichiro Masuda in particular was quite compelling. Being a small jazz bar in a small town, the musicians are not exactly famous professionals whose names everyone would know, and yet the sheer physical presence of the instruments and the live heat of the performance were quite different from classical music in a number of ways — the way sound travels and projects, the whole sense of it.

What matters when reproducing jazz through audio equipment, and how fundamentally different the key concerns are from classical music even though both are live performances — this I was able to understand not just intellectually, but through physical sensation. The sense of distance that comes from the balance of direct and reflected sound, the ability to reproduce an upright bass, the directness of the drums — the points that matter, from the attack of individual notes to the frequency response, were entirely different from what I normally focus on. It may be that classical and jazz reproduction can coexist tolerably well up to a point, but if you want something with genuine physical presence, it might be rather difficult without actively committing to one or the other — unless you happen to have a thoroughgoing high-end system.

Now, when it comes to jazz as a genre — my father is a jazz-only devotee, so the house is full of CDs and records, and yet I myself rarely listen to it apart from a few high-quality pressings I happen to own. Part of the reason, if I am candid, is that despite running a blog like this and holding forth about music on a regular basis, I still do not really understand what to listen for in jazz…

As a lover of classical music, I would go quite mad without Bach, Mozart, or Chopin every day, and I will listen to virtually anything in the classical repertoire from Baroque and sacred music through to the modern era. I do not dislike acoustic rock like The Beatles, or synthesiser-heavy healing-style new age music, or domestic and international pop, or Latin and Slavic folk music, and I can even get on reasonably well with dance music. On top of that, I seem to have developed something of an anime song brain, so I tend to feel that I can listen to just about anything.

Anime songs are, in fact, a genre in which professional composers representing modern Japan take music from all over the world and mash it together to suit whatever content they are working on. You enjoy and get swept up in the voice acting — sometimes knowingly treating an amateur-ish vocal performance as part of the fun — while underneath it all, a steady supply of genuinely accomplished tracks permeates and underpins every corner of Japanese background music month after month. So you really ought not to look down on this genre. In fact, people who dismiss anime songs out of hand with a sniff are, I would argue, nothing more than pseudo-intellectuals who can only appreciate music dressed up in the approval of others. If you have a complaint, try writing a song yourself — or so I feel like declaring. Consider that a test bark.

Indeed, if you look at the listening choices reflected in Hi-Fi magazines and the like, the majority of Hi-Fi enthusiasts in their forties and above tend to be devotees of jazz, classical, or both; and among those in their twenties to early thirties — well, the people who listen to jazz or classical have always formed a certain fixed minority in any era, while the general Hi-Fi buying demographic tilts heavily towards the Akihabara crowd. Those above a certain age may not grasp it, but from experience it is simply undeniable. That said, my own situation — holding both classical and anime songs in my head simultaneously — is a rather unusual case, so perhaps not the most useful reference point.

Setting anime songs aside, the mainstream among the parent generation of music lovers seems to be enjoying both jazz and classical together — which makes me wonder whether there is something wrong with me for being so firmly on one side only. I can listen to classical without difficulty, and yet I genuinely do not understand what to listen for in jazz, or how to enjoy it. I cannot deny that this is, in a very real sense, a limitation for me when it comes to introducing audio on this little corner of the internet.

I suppose the only way forward is to find some aspect of it that I can connect with and work my way in from there — but that initial foothold still eludes me.

Going by my limited experience so far, the one thing I can listen to without resistance is the vocals of Shigeko Suzuki. For some reason her CDs make me sleepy, so I have ended up buying quite a few. Then there is Akiko Yano and Chie Ayado. They are very different from each other and both have quite strong vocal personalities, but regardless of whether I actually like them, they are visually striking characters too, so there is something to them. That said, I am not quite at the point of wanting to actively build up a collection of their CDs. SACD releases do pique my interest, though. All very well-known Japanese names, I notice. M·A Recordings discs are excellent across the board in both sound quality and performance, though my own collection leans towards their more approachable Latin and folk-flavoured titles, which feel rather different from what I have in mind when I picture jazz. I tend to enjoy this kind of folk music flavour in general — Couperin on their label I can embrace wholeheartedly. If I am honest, I would ideally like the entire M·A Recordings catalogue…

And just because I listen to classical, it does not follow that jazz arrangements of classical pieces would be a good starting point — they are actually a bit different from what I want. These tend to sound to me like degraded arrangements of pieces I already know, and in many cases they leave me more unsettled rather than less. So yes, the question of where to even begin remains rather unresolved.

Running a pure audio system means I do have a fondness for high-quality recordings. With classical music, though, a high-quality pressing often means it is precisely not a benchmark recording, and I suspect the same is probably true of jazz. That said, if there is too much thick, murky intensity it will definitely put me off; and yet having grown accustomed to classical, I find that I tend to listen analytically without quite realising it, which means anything that feels half-hearted, evasive, or simply falls apart will put me off as well.

It may be that I have no particular affinity with Black culture, and so music with a strongly Black musical character simply does not work for me. I have a vague sense that this might be part of it. Which is perhaps why I find music with a Latin, European, or Japanese flavour more accessible than what you might call traditional jazz-sounding jazz.

Given all that, if anyone could tell me where someone like me ought to start in order to get past this reluctance towards jazz, I would be glad to hear it. Though of course that is easier said than done. Conversely, when someone asks me where they should start with classical music, I find myself rather at a loss in various ways… ← If anything, I have a track record of failing to convert anyone.