Black and white japan scenery8/7/2023 ![]() It was associated with dance halls, it was associated with "modern girls" and "modern boys" - the Japanese version of flappers and dandies - and the urban leisure classes: excess, and dogs and cats sleeping together, and all those sorts of portents of future calamity. that's sort of where it came into mass consciousness. So the first time a lot of people hear the word "jazz" is in 1929, in a popular song attached to a movie called Tokyo March. They made Japanese versions of those, sometimes with translated lyrics, and with some of those same pioneering musicians being in the studio bands. With the beginning of the popular music recording industry in the '20s, one of the first big records was "My Blue Heaven," and "The Sheik of Araby," and songs like that. It eventually must have become more into the popular culture and entertainment rather than, say, the hotel lobbies. ![]() Some of the Japanese musicians say the first time they ever heard anybody "faking" or ad-libbing, it was Filipinos. Because the Philippines were an American colony, supposedly that's the reason they became so adept at it. There was precious little improvisation, but that wasn't as big a deal, as you know, in American jazz of the 1910s or '20s.Īnother thing - and there's a book waiting to be written about this - is that Filipino musicians were learning jazz, and they played in hotel and ocean-liner orchestras, in Kobe and Osaka and Shanghai and places like that. And so it seems that the first musicians who were playing something that we would recognize as ragtime or foxtrot or jazz were those people. They were also buying records, and when they would go back, these ocean-liner musicians also worked in hotel lobby orchestras. And they learned a lot of the foxtrot repertoire and other kinds of popular music that was coming out at that time. And pretty much it seems like when they arrived in places like San Francisco or Seattle, a lot of the time those musicians would get off and go to music stores and buy sheet music. In the 1910s, there was a growth in luxury liners going across the Pacific - Americans and Japanese going across from the West Coast and Japan, and Shanghai and Manila, and places like that. How did it get to Japan in the very beginning? We often think of jazz as this very American thing - at least for us Americans - but it's been a very international music from the very start. In 2007, bandleader Gerald Wilson presented pianist (and fellow bandleader) Toshiko Akiyoshi with the NEA Jazz Masters award, the highest U.S.-government-supported recognition for jazz artistry. Here's an edited version of our conversation: An East Asian historian at Northern Illinois University and an amateur musician, he's the author of Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan and the editor of Jazz Planet, a collection of essays about jazz outside the U.S. ![]() in WWII come to embrace an art form that originated in black America? And does the history of jazz in Japan actually support the peace-brokering role that UNESCO claims?įor a few answers, and a primer on Japanese jazz history, I gave professor E. So how did this music get to Japan in the first place? How did the island nation which fought the U.S. (As of publication, the concert video archive should be available shortly.) Incidentally, the centerpiece Global Concert of this year's International Jazz Day - the annual musical diplomacy initiative from UNESCO and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz - was held today in Osaka, one of Japan's historical jazz capitals. ![]() If you've witnessed a headlining performance from pianists Toshiko Akiyoshi or Hiromi, visited a "jazu kissa" cafe where records are spun and coffee poured, or read nearly any work by author Haruki Murakami, then you probably have a sense that Japan has taken well to jazz music. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe celebrates with saxophonist Sadao Watanabe after performing with high-school students from Fukushima in northern Japan in 2013.
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