This Day in Japanese Jazz

Sendai’s Jōzenji-dōri — a zelkova-lined boulevard in the city that produced the reedman Kazutoki Umezu — is not a jazz district, which is roughly the point. On September 15, 1991, twenty-five groups and 150 musicians played nine street-corner stages along it, in light rain that cleared, for a crowd of about 5,000. The idea came from the pianist Mitsuhiro Sakakibara, who had watched buskers in Boston and concluded that music belonged outdoors, and from Masahiko Gotō of the 141 shopping building, who wanted an existing indoor jazz series moved onto the pavement. It was billed simply as the Jōzenji Jazz Festival. By year two it had added “Street” to the name and quietly stopped being a jazz festival at all, admitting rock, gospel, classical and folk — “jazz” retained for the attitude rather than the repertoire. It now draws some 620,000 people and 734 groups, still volunteer-run, with the musicians paying a participation fee rather than collecting one.

On July 7, 1976, Ryo Fukui — a self-taught pianist who ran a small jazz kissa called Slowboat in Sapporo — booked Yamaha Hall for a session with his brother Yoshinori on drums and Satoshi Denpo on bass, and self-produced the result with Masataka Ito for the small Trio label. Scenery sold modestly and, per its own Wikipedia entry, was "virtually ignored" outside Japan; Fukui went back to running his club and barely recorded again for two decades, until his death in 2016. Then, sometime in the 2010s, its red cover surfaced in listeners' YouTube recommendations — the platform's algorithm apparently as curious about a decades-old, self-released trio date as any human crate-digger — and the record became, almost by accident, the one non-Japanese listeners now picture first when they picture Japanese jazz at all. WRWTFWW Records gave it a proper reissue in 2018. At least one secondary source misdates the session to September; Trio's own catalog and Wikipedia agree on July 7.