Letter from the Road in Japan: One

So, today I am continuing writing about clubs and club owners. We had gigs the last two days, first in Kure (near Hiroshima) and then Okayama. The gig in Kure was sponsored by a jazz fan club there. It was very nice to see 40 or 50 people come out to a little hall and support a concert in this small town near the ocean. They sponsor a number of gigs during the year, although their funds are pretty limited. It was, nonetheless, very satisfying to go there and hang out with these folks and they treated us very well. In Okayama, the situation is a little different. The club is called Bird and it's one of those places when you travel around Japan that you come to fairly often. It's an old club with signatures and best wishes on the wall from the many jazz players that have performed there: Nasheet Waits, Sam Newsome, Bill Stewart, Billy Drummond, Eric Alexander, Harold Mabern and on and on. (At one of these tiny clubs that could only hold about 20 people I remember seeing Ray Brown's and Elvin Jones' signatures.) The master who started Bird died a little over a year ago and it's being carried on by the present master Horiguchi san, who is struggling a bit to keep the club going. On the positive side, almost all of the audience are in their 20s, mainly students and amateur players from the local college. That's a great demographic to see and I hope to come back to this club many times in the future: it's a place that's worth supporting. Usually between the sound check and the gig we stop by a nice Okinawa food restaurant in the area. We've been there so many times that the staff know us and we always come by early, before anyone else comes in. This time, they were rehearsing for a gig, a duo playing Shamisen and taiko drums. On the last tune all of the staff came out dancing, and they dragged Gene, Daiki and myself to our feet and we all danced together. (Not sure I want this to become a tradition but it was pretty cool nonetheless...) Anyway, today is our last road gig before we go back to Tokyo, and it's at Himeji's Layla, a club that is really like no other. I've been going there almost 20 years and the level of enthusiasm of the audience at this place is really unmatched by anywhere else I've been. It's something between a jazz fan club and a jazz club, something that U.S. clubs could take a page from. It may not be in our cultural DNA the same way it is in Japan, but we need to support these places, hanging out, making them "our" clubs as audience members and players. In New York, we are blessed with the Village Vanguard, Smoke, Smalls, the Jazz Standard, Birdland, Dizzy's, Iridium, the Blue Note, the Zinc Bar, 55 Bar, the Lenox Lounge just to name a few. Sometimes the New York sense of cool keeps us from embracing these places as fans and as players--and club owners don't always make it easy--but that's what we have to do. We need these places and they need us. Sorry for the preaching, but I'm just saying...