Japanese Jazz Bands

Ken Terui poses with artists at Johnny's Jazz Cafe. John Burnett/NPR hide caption

The March 11 quake and tsunami took more than 13, 000 lives and cleaned whole cities off the chart of Japan. One of several lesser-known casualties was the loss of outstanding jazz record collection — the life span's work of one guy.

It belonged to Ken Terui, a jazz aficionado who has Johnny's Jazz Cafe when you look at the northeastern prefectural (state) capital of Morioka, a rural area known much more for aging rice farmers than jazz lovers. Discovering Terui's club — everyone calls him Johnny — was the large point of my three-week assignment in Japan covering the aftermath associated with the tsunami.

The not likely evening began whenever my translator, Chie, and I sat down in a small restaurant in Morioka for yakatori (skewered grilled chicken) and dropped into discussion with a lively Japanese girl called Ritsuko sitting at the countertop close to united states. She volunteered that she adored jazz — specifically Count Basie — and eventually she requested us when we'd like to follow this lady into city's only jazz club.

We moved 10 obstructs inside chilly late-spring night, discovered a brightly-lit drugstore, descended a trip of stairs, and joined a cellar jazz den. The clients were drinking highballs in a haze of cigarette smoke. The walls of this club had been plastered with posters of Japanese jazz performers.

Ken Terui endured behind the club combining beverages. He's a young-looking 64, with a salt-and-pepper beard and he wears a conventional Japanese apron labeled as a maekake. He stepped across the bar and launched himself to us — I do not think he got numerous gaijin, or foreign people, inside the place.

Terui is an authority on Japanese jazz. He lectures, produces files, produces concerts, and accumulates. Their number of a lot more than 10, 000 tracks — primarily vinyl 33 rpm disks — had been a treasure-trove of Japanese jazz designers such as for instance tenor saxophonist Miyazawa Akira, pianist Honda Takehiro, and drummer Masahiko Togashi.