E. Taylor Atkins
September 2001

"The book opens with my first experience in hearing jazz that moved me in Japan, and how I went there with very low expectations, thinking I could study it and not be moved by it because I had never heard anything good about Japanese jazz. I’d listened to Akiyoshi Toshiko and I loved her music, but everything I’d read said that she was an anomaly."

Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan
E. Taylor Atkins
Duke University Press
0822327104

Reviewed By
Wayne Zade

By Wayne Zade

AAJ: Can you tell me how it was that you came to an interest in jazz—in the family, playing an instrument, in school?

TA: Well, I grew up in the South, in Little Rock. I grew up listening more to country music than anything else. I’d say that Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger was the first “soul” music that really moved me. (I can’t hear old Southern Baptist hymns like “Just As I Am” without wanting to cry.) Occasionally there was what they called a jazz show on a black radio station in Lonoke, Arkansas, and I would listen to that sometimes. My dad bought me a Sidney Bechet record when I was in high school; I guess that was really my first jazz record. But then I really got into jazz—I bought the LP Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits when I was a freshman in college, and I just listened to it over and over and over again; I just liked the sound of it. I had no idea what I was listening to—nothing. I just loved the way it felt, I guess. This was in 1986. After that, I just went crazy. Now, I’ve got something like 900 records and CDs. By some people’s collectors standards, that’s not very many; but on my income . . .

AAJ: I know what you mean. Tell me a little more about your college years and jazz.

TA: Yeah, I just read everything I could get my hands on about jazz, until I knew everything about what I had bought. I would read something about a style I hadn’t gotten into yet, and then I’d just be adventurous and go and buy examples of it. The first Ornette Coleman record I bought was Song X, which is a wild and wooly record. I made myself listen to it, and I made myself learn to appreciate it. I bought that stuff, I bought New Orleans stuff. I learned to appreciate the different styles of jazz. I went to concerts—the Mitchell-Ruff duo came to the University of Arkansas, where I was, to play, and I absolutely went ape over them.

I managed to write at least three papers on jazz for my classes. We had an honors colloquium on “Psychology and Art,” and I wrote a paper on the psychology of avant-garde jazz. I wrote something on Eric Dolphy for a class on the ‘60s. My teachers were very tolerant of that; they actually really dug it, because it was something different.

AAJ: I’ve been fortunate in finding some passionate students very interested in taking my classes in jazz history.

TA: They’re looking for something different from what they know.

AAJ: Yeah, and something that still has resemblances musically to what they know.

TA: Medeski, Martin, and Wood are on the cover of Jazz Times this month. I was just reading through the article about them, and one of the things they said was that yeah, the kids today, about 20, 21 years old, are looking for something different, and they are no longer afraid of dissonance, dissonance doesn’t scare them. When you’re talking about kids who grew up listening to punk, you can’t scare them. You get those people to listen to, say, Sun Ra, or some of the more out cats, they respond to that, they think that’s cool. It sounds like their life, it’s something that they’re interested in. That’s something that, a generation ago, was a harder sell.

AAJ: During college, you had a year away at Kansai Gaidai University, in Osaka.

TA: It was one semester.

AAJ: How did you get interested in going for that opportunity?

TA: When I was in college, I just wanted to go abroad, I didn’t really care where. I had developed an interest in Asian history because, when I was a freshman in World Civ, the Asian historian at Arkansas—his name is Henry Tsai—did a guest lecture, and I was just so fascinated. In my education I had never been forced to think about that part of the world. So, I started taking classes with him, and I was looking for opportunities to go abroad. I might have wound up in China, I might have wound up in Africa. The only condition was that I had to have a full scholarship because I didn’t have any money.

There was a deal at Arkansas where there was a foundation that would pay all the expenses for a student to go to Gaidai for a semester, and of course Gaidai sent a student to Arkansas. I applied and got it and went. It was sort of an accident because that was the only full paid scholarship that I could find. After that, I did home-stay there, I started studying Japanese there, and after that it was sort of inertia. My initial motivation to keep going was to learn the language better so I could communicate better with my host family, who had no English. But we managed to get along very well in four months. I had a lot of incentive to develop my language skills quickly.

AAJ: Were you able to continue to study Japanese when you came back?

TA: Yeah, sort of, in a half-assed manner. After I graduated from college, I stayed at Arkansas, and I was a residence hall manager, but I was sort of taking a year off. I was taking classes, as a non-degree graduate student, but I was sort of waiting to see if I really wanted to go into serious graduate work. I took a class there to keep my hand in, but after that year, I went to the University of Illinois to get my Ph.D. and of course I continued studying Japanese there.

AAJ: Did you continue to travel to Japan during your graduate school years?

TA: I went back in 1993 and stayed until ’95. That was when I did a year of language work at what they call the Stanford Center in Yokohama. Then I did a year of research. And all of that was on a Fulbright grant. But between 1988 and ’93, I didn’t get a chance to go back to Japan.

AAJ: You received encouragement or assistance from the Japan-U.S. Educational Commission. Can you tell me about that?

TA: Oh, that was the Fulbright grant. JUSEC is what they call it. The commission administers the Fulbright grants for people going over there. They were just incredibly helpful and supportive. I think I had a pathetic, to tell you the truth, dissertation proposal. I didn’t have enough information, there hadn’t been enough done, my language wasn’t good enough yet. But the novelty of the topic must have bowled them over. The proposal was just enough to convince them that I could probably do it.

AAJ: At what point in your graduate career did you decide on the dissertation topic of jazz in Japan?

TA: My very first semester. This was the fall of 1990. Actually, that summer before I entered—actually, this is in the new Acknowledgements section of my book—I was very plagued with doubts; I’m thinking, “My gosh, I’m going to do this thing on Japanese history, and yes, I’m interested in it, but what I really care about is music. Is this there some way I can integrate these interests?” And I got there and I was in a seminar on Japanese popular culture with two of my mentors, Ron Toby in history and David Plath in anthropology. We had to come up with a research topic, and it just came out of nowhere and hit me that I could do this.

I’d have to say that all along they were very supportive of it. I think at times they—especially Ron--were very concerned that I not write from a fan’s point of view. He was afraid that I was going to write this document that he called “jazz buff history,” in a very derisive manner. I think you know the kind of thing he was talking about. Just sort of hagiography, and getting obsessed with who did what first, and tracing influences, and stuff like that. Not asking any sort of larger historical questions. He warned me about that so much that I don’t think there was any way I could have produced a document like that. And I was glad for that advice. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced he thinks I didn’t produce “jazz buff history,” but I don’t think there was any way I was ever going to satisfy him completely.

AAJ: From the dissertation, I jotted down the names of other American scholars, and I guess I was referring to their M.A. theses: Richards, Brown, and Sesler-Beckman.

TA: Sidney Brown was really the first American historian to write about jazz in Japan. He was already an established professor at the University of Oklahoma, and more known for work on Meiji era political figures, Kido Koin (Kido is the surname), in particular. Brown was a huge jazz fan and spent some time going to clubs in Japan and stuff. He had studied Japanese at the Naval Language Training Institute in Colorado during the War. He got a hold of some of the Japanese scholarship on jazz and wrote up three or four conference papers that he delivered on the subject. He also did some of his own interviews with major pre-War figures, especially some Japanese Americans who had gone over in the ‘30s to make their fortunes in Japan.

AAJ: When was Sidney Brown most active in his work?

TA: I think he presented his first paper on jazz in Japan in 1980 in New Orleans. (That paper is referenced in my bibliography.) He interviewed people like Moriyama Hisashi and then a guy named Charles Kikugawa, who couldn’t break into entertainment in the U.S. because of racism and went back to Japan. They were the most authentic people because they were from America. Brown did some of his own research that way. He’s just finished a documentary film that I saw in April and that was really good.

Larry Richards’ master’s thesis is written in Japanese. He wrote it at Geidai (Tokyo School of Fine Arts) in ’92, I believe. He’s a musician but now he works for Ericsson, a Swedish telecommunications company. He’s a pianist and is really interested in computer music. His language skills are fantastic. He was a very dogged researcher, was able to find just all kinds of obscure things, and he shared all of it with me. I found some of my own things, but he had collected a lot of the pre-War things, a lot of which he didn’t actually use in his thesis and which he shared with me. Larry wrote a really substantial thesis on how sort of the concept of jazz in the 1920s differed from the music of jazz in the 1930s.

Elizabeth Sessler-Beckman’s thesis was written before Larry’s and hers is in English. She wrote it at Tufts University, and you should be able to get a copy of it from there. I’ve only been in touch with her once and that was when she sent me the thesis, and I sent her a CD as a present back. I’m not sure how to contact her anymore, and she hasn’t pursued the subject. Her thesis was not about history, it was more contemporary stuff. She didn’t really have any language skills to speak of, but she did get in there and play with some of the people. She turned out a thesis about how the Japanese jazz people had actually developed a sort of identifiable national style. Now I’m very critical of that whole concept of a national style, but aside from that, her work is amazing, considering her lack of language skills. She did a really significant piece of work.

AAJ: Can you tell me about the differences between the dissertation and Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, the book that is going to come out? I know you said that you virtually rewrote it.

TA: I guess one of the things that I did was to de-dissertationize some of the writing. I tried to make it more lively and colorful and interesting. I don’t feel right just writing this book and having only specialists in Japanese studies read it. I think I can have scholarly integrity and still reach a broader audience, and so I tried to write that way.

AAJ: So you must be delighted that I’m thinking of using it as a class text.

TA: Well, yeah. I’d never imagined that. And I never imagined that a course on this particular topic would be offered. I thought, if the book were ever adopted, it would be for courses on Japanese popular music, Japanese popular culture.

In revising the book, I sort of messed with the organization. I tried to make each of the chapters more thematically coherent. The way it’s set up in the dissertation, it’s sort of decade-by-decade; and I think now that that was a very pedestrian way to do it. It’s much more thematically based now. For instance, Chapter 5 in the dissertation deals with the Occupation. Chapter 5 in the book deals with the Occupation but I also include, I moved some of the early stuff from Chapter 6 in the dissertation to Chapter 5 in the book. So Chapter 6 now deals with the idea of national style and it’s not just about the jazz of the ‘60s. That kind of thing. Chapter 3 in the dissertation is about the 1930s. Chapter 3 in the book is about the jazz debates in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So I moved some things between chapters to have each chapter have more of a theme.

The other thing that I did that I think is very important is I added stuff, I wrote a wholly different prelude about my experience. The book now opens with my first experience in hearing jazz that moved me in Japan, and how I went there with very low expectations, thinking I could study it and not be moved by it because I had never heard anything good about Japanese jazz. I’d listened to Akiyoshi Toshiko and I loved her music, but everything I’d read said that she was an anomaly. So I said to myself I’d just go in and listen to this and just not say anything about whether it’s any good or not, I’m just going to study it.

Then I had this experience where I go into this club and I just hear the most amazing music I’ve ever heard in my life—it’s the way the musicians got into it, it’s the attitude they took in presenting it, it’s the way they got the entire crowd involved—there was a guy, a construction worker, with his dirty split-toed boots on, and he had no teeth and a battered trumpet and a monkey on his shoulder. And they’re kind of participating in the music. The way they swept this whole crowd up, it just blew me away. For the first time I thought, these people can make this music real too. So now I begin the book with those kind of more personal observations, and I guess, confessions. If you put those things in a dissertation, it’s considered unprofessional.

AAJ: This sounds like your director’s warning about “jazz buff history.”

TA: From his perspective, if the music gets to you at all, you’re not supposed to admit it. But now I put more of myself into the book, as an observer and participant in this scene. I use a lot more of the interview data that I collected. Some of my advisors just weren’t keen on oral history at all, that it didn’t have any validity. Or you couldn’t verify it with documents. They don’t use that themselves. But I went back over all my notes and tapes and I put a lot more of the voices of the musicians and the fans back into it. David Plath, who’s an anthropologist, said at my defense, “Well, this is a book about jazz, and it should be sort of fun to read. We should hear something about the people who are making it.” It was kind of disconcerting because I’d been told to leave all that out, and now, at my defense, I was being told to put it back in. And so I did. And it felt good.

AAJ: The notion of “authentication” is obviously of central importance in your book. Can you talk a little about this?

TA: I think I can define “authentication” more clearly now than I could or did in the dissertation. I guess, to me, in terms of jazz, authenticity is—and one thing I’ve learned in reading about it is that everybody makes up his or her own definition of it—there’s no authentic definition of authenticity—but, to me, in jazz or the way it’s applied in jazz, it’s the notion of having a certain kind of background, and it might be a socio-economic background, maybe a racial background, or something of that nature that gives you the right to be considered an innovator in the art. And everybody else who comes after you has to match that profile in some way in order to continue to do something innovative.

In other words, you have to be authentic to be an innovator, and of course you probably have to be an innovator to be authentic too.

It seems to me that one of the more interesting things about jazz is that, in a way, there’s this meritocracy, in which whether you can play or not is the only thing that matters. There’s that, but there’s also the side that, well, who decides who can play? And who will let somebody play? And who will listen? All of that is determined in the real world by race, by gender. And so, jazz sort of wants it both ways. They want you to have a certain color of skin, perhaps, or be a certain gender, to be authentic. But also they say it’s just your abilities that count. There’s also the factor that jazz insists on constant innovation and stylistic change, or whatever. But to get to that point, you have to completely lose your own individuality in the study of Ellington, Monk, these certain people whom you have to deal with first before you can be yourself. If you start by being yourself, then you’re not the real thing, you’re not authentic.

AAJ: Do you know T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” on poetry?

TA: Yes, I’ve heard of it. People say that tradition is important and it always has been. Well, yes, but I don’t think Louis Armstrong was thinking about tradition, or was worried about it. I don’t think Duke Ellington—Ellington was a big fan of New Orleans music and of spirituals and things like that, but at no point did those really great people whom we consider great innovators ever let tradition prevent them from making the music that they wanted to make. And I don’t think it’s that way anymore.

I think there are a lot of people out there who are so hung up on tradition that inhibits—for instance, and I hate to make him the only whipping boy because he’s not the only one—but when Wynton Marsalis writes a composition, and he’s writing voices, doing orchestrations and writing voices, say, for a saxophone section or something, I think that he’s thinking, and I could be wrong, he’s thinking, “How would Duke write this?” Rather than, “How would Wynton write it?” He’s so into instructing people on the tradition.

AAJ: Look what his father does for a living. His father has been a jazz professor in a university for 25 years.

TA: Right, yeah. So it’s like he wants to use the opportunity where he gets his works commissioned to teach people about Duke and to voice the saxophones the way Duke would, rather than the way he might. Partially, that’s just part of the postmodern condition where it’s all been done before and there are very few avenues left to voice saxophones that haven’t been done already. It’s also just part of his attitude. And again, like I said, and I’ve heard other people say this, I don’t think that Count Basie, or any of those other great people like him that we talk about, cared about that.

AAJ: Another guy would be Charles Mingus.

TA: Oh, absolutely. Those guys loved the tradition, in a way, but they never let it keep them from making the music that they heard and wanted to do.

AAJ: Or Monk.

TA: Yes, absolutely. I think there’s a kind of inhibition now. Half of the albums made these days are tribute albums. How many more Monk or Morton or Ellington, especially, tributes do we need, for God’s sake? If today’s players were discovering new compositions that nobody else was doing, that would be great. But they’re not. They’re still playing the same old stuff.

AAJ: Can you tell me about the Japanese jazz education “system”? “System” must be too strong a word. So many Japanese young people come to study jazz in the States. Something like 10% of the students at Berklee are from Japan.

TA: See, that’s the authentication strategy nowadays! I wouldn’t say that there’s anything like a jazz education system in Japan. What there is, is if you have a high school band teacher who really likes jazz and wants to start a jazz band in the school, he will. It seemed to me that a lot of the people I was meeting first heard about jazz when they went to college. Most of the universities and colleges have bands, jazz bands. Maybe the students will have played some instruments before in brass band in high school or junior high, but when they get to college they start playing jazz. Now all of it’s very unofficial, though. They carry the school name, but they don’t get credit for taking a class in it.

The one I observed was Waseda, the High Society orchestra, which is very highly respected, it has performed all over the world. Those guys do it as a club, and they spend a lot more time on that than on their studies. You’ve heard the stereotype of Japanese college students, and it fits there. They find this hobby and they learn from the people above them in class. The students run the whole thing, they don’t even have a faculty advisor. If they do, that person may or may not be a jazz musician.

There are private music schools where you can take jazz lessons. These are not a recent development. There were private music schools going back to the ‘50s. And Watanabe Sadao opened a jazz school that was largely modeled on the Berklee curriculum in 1966 or 1967, and everybody said that that was the first jazz school. They had a rehearsal orchestra and they had theory classes and stuff. Watanabe didn’t actually finish, he didn’t graduate. He had one semester left and he missed his family. He was in Boston by himself and was probably just miserable. He went back to Japan and took all his books with him and started this school, and a bunch of people came to study with him. That was regarded as the first really formal jazz training. I met a number of musicians who teach part-time and they do it at these private music schools.

AAJ: I’ve heard that Elvin Jones has a jazz academy in Japan. Is that true?

TA: I haven’t heard of that. His wife is Japanese. Elvin Jones was in Japan for a while in the ‘60s and played with people. I didn’t hear of him being connected with an academy.

AAJ: Let me change directions for us here. Do you have an update on remarks by Branford Marsalis and Kenny Garrett in Playboy in 1993 that were critical of the Japanese jazz fans?

TA: That happened when I had been over there about four months. I wound up being there for two years. It sort of disappeared. I haven’t heard anything new about it. I wrote up all the immediate reactions. I don’t know if Branford’s gone back to play there. I don’t even know if he knows how much of a controversy he stirred up. Usually it’s the Japanese players who come in for criticism. But this time it was the fans. What Branford and Kenny did was debunk this myth that if you go over there to play, everybody’s going to love you and you’re going to make a million bucks and they’ll understand what you’re playing. Which needed to be done, in a way. And actually what they said, in my opinion, especially what Kenny Garrett said, was not completely off base. He said that the Japanese fans want to hear the same old standards all the time.

AAJ: Several people in the record business have told me that.

TA: Yeah, but that’s not so different from the U.S. It’s cheap, you don’t have to pay the composers’ royalties again. I wouldn’t dare say that the popular taste in Japan is any more conservative than it is here. There’s a variety. There are people in Japan, if you go to the right clubs, who want to hear something new. They’re tired of hearing “Green Dolphin Street” or whatever. Just like it is here. And then there are people in Japan who just want to hear what they know, like “Moanin’ “. That always got big raucous applause every time I heard it played in Japan. Or “Night in Tunisia.”

The only thing that might have been unfair in Kenny Garrett’s statement was if he was saying that this is something that is peculiar to the Japanese; then that wouldn’t be fair. But the general sentiment is correct, I think.

AAJ: Joe Lovano told me that he was very impressed with how his audiences responded in Japan and that he didn’t have to do anything different there, really.

In fact, he was really talking about a kind of continuum of world folk music. Not what I would call, or what the record companies, call “world beat.” Lovano kept using the phrase “folk music” a lot and referring to the continuousness of folk music from one culture to another.

TA: It sounds to me like what Paul Robeson used to say. That guy went all over the world, and he said he would listen to music in eastern Europe, he would listen to Icelandic music, listen to Chinese music. And he always found that nearly all of the music was pentatonic scales and they have these sort of mournful sounds to them. He believed that there was this connection that you could verify musicologically between all the world’s folk musics.

AAJ: Joe Lovano also really stressed the work of Paul Motian, who, I guess, does quite a bit of traveling to Japan too.

TA: He may, yes. He’s of Armenian descent and he may play music that evokes that kind of spirit.

AAJ: Tell me, in the year 2000, what you think is the state of the art of jazz in Japan and what you see in the future for jazz in Japan.

TA: OK, let’s take the state of jazz first. It’s healthy, but it’s not what people imagine it to be. The jazz critics in the U.S. are so upset, and rightfully so, about the lack of appreciation for the music here. When they go Europe and they go to Japan and they see how into it some people are, that really strikes them, and I think that what they’ve tended to do is overstate how popular jazz is. And when you go over there and get among the fans, the people who really care and the people who show up at concerts and buy the records, they know a lot about jazz, they know a ridiculous amount about it. But they are not representative. Some people make it appear that everybody in Japan loves jazz, and they don’t. It’s easy to forget that.

But I’d say that jazz is healthy there because it’s a firmly ensconced and respectable hobby for certain people and it hasn’t always been that way. Half a century ago, it wasn’t that way. But now, among college-educated people who live in cities and have a certain income level and are self-styled cosmopolitans, it’s OK for them to listen to jazz, nobody’s going to say anything to them about it. And in Tokyo, in particular, I’ll say, there are lots of places to go to hear music every night. There are festivals all over the country and there seem to be more all the time. Cities are sponsoring these, municipal governments. So there’s a certain aura or respectability and cosmopolitanism that jazz confers, and that speaks well for the music and gives it some support. But there’s nothing like the kind of steady public government support that used to exist at least in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, maybe.

Now, as far as the future goes. In a way, there are really a lot of capable young players coming up. Some of them are actually getting a lot of support, like Onishi Junko (I don’t write about her much in the dissertation but more in the book). She is, in my opinion, a very talented pianist, and she has the right sort of attitude, in making her own music, in terms of the tradition. She plays stuff that these retro-boppers wouldn’t touch. She’s very adventurous and an incredible player. Everything she plays just makes sense. She’s been incredibly popular in Japan, in part because of the way she’s been marketed, she’s a sex symbol. So there are players like her who are coming up. There’s a new star “flavor of the month” all the time. But that’s the way it is here. In a way, that may be good because it may be drawing younger people; but in a way, it’s not good because it’s too superficial and star-driven. The whole “flavor of the month” approach and looking for younger and younger players all the time just sort of gets in my craw.

The other thing is that I don’t think the authenticity hang-ups are gone. All these people, the stars, they all study at Berklee, they still have to play with Americans, they have to play with black Americans, in order to be recognized at home. I think it’s sad that the people in the ‘60s, who really tried to buck this, who really tried to do something different, that was self-referentially authentic, those guys and a lot of others who followed in the next generation of avant gardists are really struggling. It’s hard for them to get press. And I’ll tell you, I think some of the best music I have ever heard is being made in Japan now. But a lot of that is not getting heard or getting any kind of press. So, if you go to the right place, the state of and the future of jazz in Japan are just incredible.

One of the interviews that I put in the book that is not in the dissertation is with this big brawny tenor saxophonist named Katayama. This guy plays in the studios with enka bands sometimes—a very sappy kind of folk genre in Japan. But then he goes out and he’ll play solo or play with somebody accompanying him on an ashtray. You know, just really wild stuff. He’s got this incredible sound. And he says that the jazz scene in Japan is better than in New York because nobody is hung up about tradition in Japan—and of course some are hung up about tradition. But in the circles he plays in, it’s very free and people have that kind of irreverent attitude and playful attitude towards style that, I think, is very healthy for the music.

AAJ: Do you think it’s a little like the Knitting Factory scene in New York?

TA: Yeah. You can find that in Japan. If you go to those places, you’re going to think that the music is alive and well and its future looks great. Except for when you look at how the musicians are being compensated and supported. But on the other hand, in the Postlude of the dissertation, I wrote about the neo-bop revival and the Jazz Restoration in Japan. I walked out of one of their concerts once because I was just bored silly. I spent 30 bucks to go and they weren’t doing anything. But those are the guys who are getting the big press, the steady contracts, the major club dates. So when you look at it that way, it’s not going well at all. But they’re the ones who are considered most authentic because they’re the ones who studied at the knee of Wynton Marsalis, literally, and are most respectful and reverent toward the tradition, and wear suits and ties and all that kind of stuff.

Obviously, I’ve let down my scholarly guard here and done a bit of editorializing.

AAJ: Thank goodness that you did.