This Day in Japanese Jazz

Gen Okuda was born in Saitama Prefecture on October 10, 2001, and the story told at his debut was that he learned jazz piano mostly off CDs. A toy piano at three; at five, a living-room piano after a move to Moroyama, plus the discovery, via the film Amadeus, that Mozart composed at five, so he started too; Bill Evans at six; Oscar Peterson as the fixation after that. Formal instruction came to three months with a teacher at eight. Pony Canyon issued his debut, titled simply Okuda Gen, on December 21, 2011. The launch press called him nine; by his birth date he was ten, which is the age his own site now gives. The program ran from “Maple Leaf Rag” and “Caravan” to an arrangement of Brahms's First Symphony, closing on Peterson's “Hymn to Freedom.” It won a Jazz Japan Award, and at twelve he became, per Oricon, the youngest composer ever admitted to JASRAC, Japan's music-copyright society.

On October 8, 1978, saxophonist Hideyasu Terakawa's quartet played the first night of a seven-day regional tour at Jazz Spot DIG in Masuda, a small city on Shimane's Sea of Japan coast, and somebody taped it. Terakawa, on tenor and soprano, had Tetsuo Miura on bass, Akihiro “Thunder” Nakaya on drums and Hiroshi Fujii as guest vibraphonist. The tape became Introducing Hideyasu Terakawa Quartet Live, five long covers of Wayne Shorter, Frank Foster and Milt Jackson tunes, and the sole release of a label called Red Horison: by Fujii's account, it was sold at a few local record shops and off the bandstand, in a pressing of fewer than 100 copies. When the UK label BBE reissued it in 2023 as the first-ever reissue, Fujii said he had never played with Terakawa again, and the notes conceded that the leader's current whereabouts “remain a mystery.” The record introduced him, in other words, and then he left.

Guitarist Yoshiaki Miyanoue was born in Setagaya, Tokyo, on October 7, 1953. He started guitar at ten, heard Wes Montgomery in junior high, and took the lesson more literally than most: he has never used a pick, playing everything with his right thumb. His apprenticeship was unusually American for a Tokyo teenager — three years in an organ trio called the New Group at the NCO club inside the U.S. Air Force's Yokota base — followed by a 1977 trip to New York. Back home, on September 25, 1978, he cut Song for Wes for King's Seven Seas label with a borrowed drummer: Philly Joe Jones, who according to Japanese Wikipedia was in the country with Bill Evans's trio. The record includes a "Blues for Philly," presumably by way of thanks. Jimmy Smith later turned up on organ for Touch of Love (1981), and Miyanoue spent decades near the top of Swing Journal's guitar poll.

On October 6, 1941, Masahiko Satoh was born in Ryogoku, Tokyo, a short walk from the sumo hall, where his father ran an illuminated-sign business. He went through Keio's school system and graduated from its economics faculty, then spent 1966 to 1968 at Berklee in Boston studying composition and arranging. His first album as leader, Palladium (1969), with Masahiko Togashi on drums, won Swing Journal's Japan Jazz Award; a year later his big-band piece Four Jazz Compositions took an Arts Festival prize. The résumé then wanders cheerfully off the map: the psychedelic score for the 1973 anime Belladonna of Sadness, music for Panda! Go, Panda!, and in 1993 the music direction of a shōmyō concert at the Nippon Budokan sung by a thousand Buddhist monks. He was still releasing new records in his eighties.

On October 5, 1929, Osamu Uchida was born in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture. He never played professionally and never wrote criticism; he became a surgeon instead, and from 1961 ran his family's hospital in Okazaki, where he fitted out a private studio with instruments, mixers and tape machines. Musicians passing through Aichi came by to play, and he taped them, among them the young Masayuki Takayanagi, Masabumi Kikuchi, Terumasa Hino and Yosuke Yamashita. In 1963 he helped found the Yamaha Jazz Club, which he chaired for decades. When saxophonist Akira Miyazawa had surgery at Uchida's hospital in 1981 and stayed two months, Miyazawa's comeback album My Piccolo came with a thank-you tune titled "Doctor U." In January 1993 Uchida gave Okazaki 12,308 records and 847 reel-to-reel tapes, which the city now displays in a room at its central library, where visitors can listen for free. He died in December 2016, aged 87.

On October 4, 2024, Takeshi Inomata died of old age at 88, six years and a day after Tadao Kitano, the pianist he had played U.S. military camps with as a teenager in a Krupa-style trio. The son of a Takarazuka Revue oboist, he learned drums by copying 78s until they wore out, moved to Tokyo in 1956, and the next year played the off-screen drums in the climactic drum battle of Nikkatsu's The Man Who Causes a Storm: most accounts have him drumming for Yujiro Ishihara's rival while Hideo Shiraki drummed for Ishihara, though film historian Toshiaki Sato has it the other way round. He went on to lead the West Liners, went to America alone in 1967, and came back to form Sound Limited, whose 1970 Sounds of Sound L.T.D. is still prized as jazz-rock. In 1976 he opened the Rhythm Clinic Center drum school, with Alan Dawson's blessing; in 1994 he took a band to Carnegie Hall.

On October 3, 2018, Tadao Kitano died of pneumonia in a Kobe hospital, aged 84, after years of treatment for Parkinson's disease. A self-taught pianist from Wakayama, he had formed a Gene Krupa-style trio at 17 with drummer Takeshi Inomata to play American military camps, then went to Kwansei Gakuin University. In 1958 he founded the house band at Club Arrow, the top nightclub in Osaka's Kita district and spent his whole career leading it from Kansai. The Arrow Jazz Orchestra backed Ella Fitzgerald in 1967, Marlene Dietrich at the 1970 Osaka Expo and Patti Page in 1981, with Hibari Misora and Anita O'Day also on the ledger. Kitano wrote more than 3,000 arrangements for it, ran a West Coast-style side unit called the Gravy Eight, and retired after the band's 50th-anniversary recital in June 2008. The band, renamed AJO, is still working.

On October 2, 1986, Last Exit — Peter Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson, a quartet whose idea of a ballad was a slightly slower riot — played PARCO Space Part 3, a performance room inside a Shibuya department-store building. Partway through, Akira Sakata, 41, formerly the alto in Yosuke Yamashita's trio, walked on with alto and clarinet. Seigen Ono engineered the tape; it was mixed at Onkio Haus on October 11–13 and mastered in Tokyo on the 18th, so the night was a finished master sixteen days later. Enemy issued it that year as The Noise of Trouble: Live in Tokyo. All but one track comes from PARCO; the exception, taped three nights later at Shinjuku Pit Inn, has Herbie Hancock on piano. Sources disagree on exactly which pieces Sakata plays — jazzdisco.org lists the last three PARCO tracks, Wikipedia a different pair — but not on the date. He and Laswell kept working together for decades.

On September 30, 1977, Kaoru Abe played a solo night at Gaya (騒), a small live house in Hatsudai, Tokyo, run by Emiko Gaya. Shinji Ohno taped the second set: one thirteen-minute improvisation on sopranino saxophone, logged as "Lonely Woman / Blowing with the Wind," a title that points at Ornette Coleman and then wanders off. It is the earliest of the Gaya recordings, which continued through August 19, 1978. Abe, who had divorced the novelist Izumi Suzuki that year, died of a drug overdose on September 9, 1978, aged 29, three weeks after the last of them. The tapes waited until 1990, when DIW began issuing them chronologically as a ten-volume series, with this set opening Vol. 1 and the club's owner credited as producer. She later wrote a memoir of the place, subtitled for Abe, Suzuki and the free-jazz players who passed through.

On September 29, 2018, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Tokyo Band held its 58th regular concert at Showa Women's University's Hitomi Memorial Hall in Tokyo, billed as "Jazz & Japan," and opened it the way that band opens things, with the "Gunkan" (Warship) March. The guest was Eiji Kitamura, then 89, a Benny Goodman devotee who had turned professional at 22. With the band behind him he played "Moonlight Serenade," his own "Satsuki ni Yosete" and "Sing Sing Sing," telling the stories behind them between numbers and sharing a solo turn with one of the band's clarinetists. The second half went Japanese: a band-commissioned rhapsody, then the folk song "Soran Bushi" reworked as "Soran Funk" with a school band and chorus. The encore was T-Square's "Omens of Love," by Hirotaka Izumi. The navy's photographers released their pictures under an open license, which is why every free photo of Kitamura on Wikimedia Commons comes from this one evening.

Hirotaka Izumi was born in Tokyo on September 28, 1958, and took a law degree from Keio University, where the more consequential coursework seems to have happened in the campus jazz club, the Light Music Society. In 1982 he joined The Square (later T-Square) on keyboards and stayed sixteen years, writing much of what the band is remembered for: "Travelers," "Omens of Love," "El Mirage." Then there is "Takarajima" ("Treasure Island"), from the 1986 album S·P·O·R·T·S. In 1987 the arranger Toshio Mashima scored it for concert band in Yamaha's New Sounds in Brass series, and it went on to become a fixture of Japanese junior-high and high-school wind bands, which means a great many Japanese teenagers have played Izumi's music without knowing who he was. He left in 1998, led small groups and recorded solo piano, and was still working when he died of acute heart failure on April 26, 2021, at 62.

On September 27, 1974, Toshiyuki Miyama's New Herd, a big band he had led under that name since 1958, walked into Aoi Studio in Tokyo to record a concert they had already given. The previous weekend, at the 17th Monterey Jazz Festival, they had become, by the band's own account, the first Japanese group invited to play it; that set was taped live, in mono, and issued by Trio as a double LP. Three Blind Mice wanted its own souvenir, so the band ran the program back for engineer Yoshihiko Kannari: Kozaburo Yamaki's opening theme, Norio Maeda's chart of "Donna Lee," Masahiko Satoh's "Sniper's Snooze," ten and a half minutes of Yamaki's "Kappa Shijo," and Chick Corea's "La Fiesta." The Dizzy Gillespie encore did not make the trip. The result, TBM-32, printed the session date right on its obi, beside a line saying Leonard Feather had praised the band.

On September 25, 1971, Toshiba's Express label issued Infinite (ETP-9038), the first album by Kazumi Watanabe, then seventeen and three weeks short of eighteen. He had started guitar at twelve at the Yamaha Music School; the session, on May 19 at Teichiku's Toranomon studio, put him in front of players who were not waiting for him to grow up: Takao Uematsu on tenor, Hideo Ichikawa on piano, Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums. Side one opens with his own title track, eleven minutes of long modal lines; side two turns to Joe Henderson's "Isotope," Kenny Dorham's "Blue Bossa" and a Jimmy Van Heusen standard the sleeve lists as "Here That Rainy Day." The whole LP runs about 32 minutes. Discogs notes the first pressing wore a different cover from later ones. His next leader date, for another label, was four years off.

Kazuo Imai was born in Kawasaki on September 24, 1955, and spent thirteen years learning guitar from a man he was determined not to sound like. He enrolled at the Yamaha Jazz School in September 1972; after two years his instructor, Masayuki Takayanagi — Japanese free jazz's most uncompromising figure — moved him to his own private school. The syllabus was classical practice books played with a pick: scales and arpeggios, six volumes in five years, then scores, and at the end nothing but Bach. Imai finished in June 1985, the only graduate in that school's history, a distinction Takayanagi's better-known student Otomo Yoshihide does not share. Meanwhile, guesting with Takayanagi's New Direction and Takehisa Kosugi's Taj Mahal Travellers, he declined to touch a guitar at all, singing or playing a replica viola da gamba instead. He stopped performing in 1985, returned in December 1991, and in 1997 convened Marginal Consort, whose four-hour improvisations still happen once a year.

On September 22, 1997, Toshiko Akiyoshi opened a three-night stand at Blue Note Tokyo with Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums — a homecoming for a pianist who left for Berklee in 1956 and never moved back. Nippon Crown taped all three nights, sat on them for four years, and issued the result on September 21, 2001 as Live at Blue Note Tokyo ’97, sold in Japan under a longer title billing the group as a “Japanese Trio” featuring Motohiko Hino. Hino had died of pancreatic cancer in May 1999, aged 53: the album is named for a man who never heard it come out. The “Japanese” framing is its own dry joke — Suzuki had held the bass chair in Stan Getz’s group and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and Hino had worked out of New York since 1978. Tower Records dates the sessions to October 1997; jazzdisco.org and Wikipedia both give September 22–24, used here.

K. Abe — 阿部克自 — found jazz in 1945 at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, of all places, listening to American forces broadcasts in English. He played guitar at US military camps while at Waseda; in 1952 he took a job at BOAC, the British airline — a salaryman’s post that came with air travel. From about 1953 he designed and shot record jackets; by the early 1960s he was based in New York, photographing the music’s canon: Ellington, Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Toshiko Akiyoshi. Japanese accounts credit an Abe portrait as the source for the 22-cent Ellington stamp the US Postal Service issued on Ellington’s birthday in 1986. In 2005 he became the first Japanese winner of the Milt Hinton Award, jazz photography’s highest honour. He died on the morning of September 17, 2008, aged 78 — Japanese Wikipedia says pneumonia, a colleague’s memorial tongue cancer — and his ashes were scattered, as he asked, in New York’s East River.

Ayako Shirasaki was born in Setagaya, Tokyo, on September 16, 1969, and took the scenic route into jazz: classical piano from the age of five, jazz from ten — taught at home by her father, a jazz trumpeter — and then, of all things, a straight classical piano degree from the Tokyo University of the Arts, the most establishment musical address in the country. She moved to New York and finished a master's in jazz piano at the Manhattan School of Music in 2001. She turned up on other people's records first: she is the pianist on the vibraphonist Tim Collins's graduation recital, taped at the school on March 24, 2002 and released the following year. Her own debut, Existence, with Lewis Nash and Marco Panascia, came out on What's New Records in August 2003, a few weeks short of her thirty-fourth birthday; four more albums followed. She died of cancer at home in New York in November 2021, aged 52.

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.