Only a Blockhead

May 28

After gray rain falls

a blue sky and bright green leaves

make my spirits soar

Back in the UK

the grey sky for days on end

weighed on my spirits

 “Little Fluffy Clouds”??

Here’s a UK parody*

sure to bring a smile!

 

*The Orb/Alan Parker** “Grey Clouds” From album Annie Nightingale Presents: Y4K

(**alter ego of comic Simon Munnery)

Sunday, December 23

As the palate learns

to savor new tastes, my ears

now relish Crossings

Two communities

I split some cedar before remembering that it’s best not to burn it in a stove. I was told there were neighbors with less worry about a coated chimney and I said I’d be glad if they took the logs off my hands. And so I met the Okamotos who farm in the adjacent valley. They have what’s best described as a community that attracts both free spirits and the marginalized. They still cook and heat the bath with wood, and people at a nearby facility for the mentally challenged help with the farm work there.

Suzuki-san is a new staff member at that facility, and he had the vision of holding an outdoor movie showing at the Okamotos this spring. I met him when he came to collect the logs, and I suggested a documentary called アラヤシキの住人たち(Arayashiki no Junintachi/The people who live at Arayashiki). It was filmed at a community farm in rural Nagano Prefecture where I once stayed and taught English. Suzuki-san said that was exactly the movie he was thinking of showing because he saw the similarity to the Okamotos’ farm.

Last night the event was realized. The Okamoto residents served curry to about 50 of us, after which we retired up into the woods where we sprayed ourselves liberally with mosquito repellent and sat on mats on the ground for Okinawan music, followed by the movie as darkness fell. It was eerie and even surreal to be watching the scenes of the Nagano countryside with the sounds of bush warblers, insects and frogs while, at the same time, the sound of local frogs drifted up from the valley, and the occasional night insect flew across the screen.

It’s an amazing coincidence that I once stayed in one community, and now discover that I live next to another. I hope I can be of help to them in future.

--Julian

The DVD of アラヤシキの住人たち has English subtitles, and is available at Amazon.co.jp and elsewhere.

Heard and seen on a recent cycle ride

A flute playing traditional music under a highway bridge

A woman picking edible wild plants by the roadside

A monk in robes and a conical hat, chanting outside someone’s front door.

A man wearing gaudy samurai armor, and another wearing just the shoulder pads, walking past a convenience store.

An out-of-the-way shrine with an unusual rope decoration: what does it represent? Answer at the end of this post.

Bush warblers calling to each other deep in a bamboo thicket.

Everywhere magnolia trees with raggedy snow-white flowers, petals akimbo; cherry trees with swollen buds about to open.

A man with a camera and a huge lens, taking pictures of birds down on the concrete river bed.

And on the way home, shakuhachi music where the flute had been before.

--Julian

Photo: The rope decoration at Hakusan Shrine in Imaizumi, Ofuna represents the shrine’s guardian deity: a giant centipede.

One for the Archives: Jazz in Japan

All of the many reviews I wrote for the long defunct Asahi Evening News disappeared from the web not long after the paper disappeared from the world. Occasionally, though, I come across one of those reviews pasted into a mailing list or a blog. Here's one I wrote back in 2002 that I stumbled upon today:

Asahi Shimbun

01 March 2002

REVIEWS: You must take the `J' train

By DAVID COZY, Special to The Asahi Shimbun

BLUE NIPPON: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. By E. Taylor Atkins. ISBN:
0-8223-2721-X. U.S.: Duke University Press. 366 pp. $21.95.

As E. Taylor Atkins notes in his excellent study ``Blue Nippon,'' the
history of jazz in the world is only slightly longer than the history of
jazz in Japan. Thus one who tries to chronicle that history needn't worry
about a lack of subject matter. Rather, confronted with a superabundance of
material, the historian of jazz in Japan must find a way to choose
intelligently from the clutter, to decide what is irrelevant and what is
essential to the story. Atkins handles this difficulty by identifying a
handful of threads that run through the history of jazz from its earliest
days in the archipelago to the present, allowing these threads to guide him
through the tangled skein of incidents.

Foremost among the strands Atkins takes hold of is the concept of
``authentication'': how does one determine-and who has the authority to
determine-which arrangements of sounds qualify as ``real jazz''? As worries
about authenticity have also bedeviled white musicians in the United States,
and because Japanese musicians are even farther from the African-American
culture now understood to be the center of the jazz world, one sees why
Atkins settled on authentication as the issue to drive his study. Further,
since what counts as authentic changes year by year, it is a useful lens
through which to look at the changing roles jazz has played in Japanese
society.

Though we would now consider musicians such as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver
and Jelly Roll Morton central to any definition of authentic jazz, Atkins
reports that ``in their personal accounts virtually none of the early
Japanese musicians cites [them] as influences.'' Rather, the ``symphonic
jazz'' that the appropriately named Paul Whiteman played was the ideal
Japanese musicians most often emulated. Symphonic jazz, music from which
``exaggerated syncopation, `unmusical sonorities' and improvisation were
eliminated,'' would not, by today's standards, be considered jazz, but in
the 1920s Japan wasn't alone in its preference for ``Whiteman and white
men.'' As Atkins notes, not until the 1930s did European critics begin to
recognize the achievements of African-American artists, and the Japanese
jazz community might have followed suit. History, however, got in the way.

During the 1930s, jazz was enormously popular in Japan, particularly in
dance halls, which thrived in spite of attempts to regulate or close them.
Indeed, so popular was jazz that even in the face of the nationalism and
nativism that came to the fore during these years, it remained part of the
Japanese musical scene. More surprising, jazz was not suppressed in Japan
even during the darkest years of World War II: it was simply too popular to
entirely eliminate.

It was not popularity alone, however, which kept jazz from being crushed by
the militarist juggernaut. The Japanese jazz community helped assure its
continued existence by joining in with the ethos of the times and shifting
the then prevailing notion of what it meant to be authentic away from
American models and toward efforts to create a jazz that was authentically
Japanese. Though much later, a few efforts of this sort would meet with some
success, during the war years attempts to create ``Japanese jazz'' were
generally no more than the ``jazzing'' of Japanese folk songs, or patriotic
songs done in the style then considered jazzy. The exception to these
trivial attempts was, Atkins informs us, the music of Koichi Sugii, which,
he says, ``holds up brilliantly to contemporary standards of jazz
performance.''

One is grateful to Atkins for making us aware of musicians we may otherwise
have missed.

Jazz in America did not, while Japanese musicians were engaged in creating
acceptably Japanese jazz, sit still. Indeed the war years and the decade or
two that followed them, the years of Coltrane and Monk, Miles and Mingus,
were nothing less than a golden age of experiment and innovation. Japanese
musicians spent the years following World War II doing their best to
understand what these masters were up to and to imitate them.

There are, of course, problems with this approach. As Atkins puts it, the
Japanese jazz community was ``in the teleological conundrum of having its
artistic future mapped out by others: its aesthetic was referential; its art
was quite deliberately derivative and its customs contrived; its faith in
its own creative powers was too often obscured by its infatuation with
American examples.'' Most Japanese musicians were not, that is, committed to
``exploration of the unknown and the unprecedented,'' a commitment that many
would argue is necessary to the creation of jazz that is authentic.

Japanese musicians, of course, recognized this dilemma and attempted to deal
with it. Atkins' discussion of some of these artists, musicians who have
indeed explored the unknown and the unprecedented, is excellent. As these
aesthetic adventurers get essentially no attention from the media, we must
thank Atkins for making us aware of artists such as bassist Hideto Kanai and
guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, musicians as interested in the work of John
Cage as they are in the work of John Coltrane and who are truly committed to
doing something new. Alas we must also join him in deploring the fact that
most of their recorded work is unavailable, and console ourselves instead
with the excellent record of their work and the work of others that Atkins
has given us in ``Blue Nippon.''

—David

Music Video

Okazaki Taiiku crams every music video cliche into his "Music Video" music video.

Coleena has slapped on some English subtitles (thanks, Coleena).

Tidy them up a bit and it could go viral worldwide.

--Julian

JT

James Taylor. We are contemporaries. I was in my teens when he was huge: California On My Mind; Sweet Baby James; Country Road; Fire and Rain. With my guitar, I strummed and sung some of his songs as best I could.

As our years went on, he was still big, and some of his songs still really resonated: Mexico; Only a Dream in Rio; Copperline. More recently were the years of cover albums. The muse had probably flown. Well, I’m not the guy I was either, so who was I to complain.

Then this year, he up and comes out with an album of new material: "Before This World". The voice is hardly diminished. The melodies, well, you’ll have your favorites, but I’ll say Angels of Fenway is worthy of inclusion among his dozen best works.

 

--Julian

Losing it

Once in awhile, I cry at what I read, listen to, watch, but it happened twice today. The first time was listening to James Taylor’s “Angels of Fenway” (on his extraordinarily good new album Before This World). I think the tears were in part about following a team, and feeling their victories and defeats as if they were family. And in part for the grandmother in the story. This evening I was snipping edamame off their stalks in the kitchen as I listened, and the tears blurred my vision, making it difficult.

The second time was after dinner, for Hosoda Mamoru’s animated movie Wolf Children. This is a director who, years ago, was hired and fired by Ghibli. I think this is his third feature and, exciting as the previous two were, here he is firmly in Miyazaki/Totoro and masterpiece territory. The scene of the family arriving in the country is a homage to Miyazaki and Totoro. And the story, about becoming who you are, is beautifully realized.  My tears were a reaction to the love and caring of all the characters.

I wonder if I’ve been softened up by what happened in the United States these last few days, gay people being granted full civil rights. As a gay person born, growing up and living in the shadow of shame, it’s quite extraordinary to feel that lifted.

--Julian 

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Talking Heads

They really were the perfect mix of intelligence and danceability.

 

--David

Merry Happy

 

--David