J Jazz: The Definitive Book

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The first of its kind, J Jazz: Free and Modern Jazz Albums From Japan 1954-1988 boasts 400 pages filled with full-size versions of Japanese Jazz album covers. It's quite literally the biggest J Jazz book ever printed! The stunning 400-page, large-format, hardcover book includes a CD with 10 Japanese Jazz tracks for good measure. We recently had the pleasure of chatting with Tony Higgins and Mike Peden, the great minds behind this spectacular series and unique collection.

Light in the Attic: You've compiled four brilliant volumes of Japanese jazz and now this incredible book. Was there an album or track that kickstarted your love for Japanese jazz?

Tony Higgins: Well, I got into funk and soul in the mid to late 1980s. Then, during the early and mid-90s, I became increasingly drawn to jazz. Anyway, via the funk and hip hop I was listening to – like EPMD, Gang Starr, Tribe, Pharcyde, etc – I started to explore breaks and samples, and the jazz stuff drew me in. So, initially, the Blue Note and funky jazz on Prestige and Fantasy. Then, I’d occasionally hear some jazz from Europe – maybe something on MPS from Germany or a British cut – I got heavily into British 1960s/1970s jazz in the late 90s, too. So, I’d hear the odd track on radio or in a club, and I’d find out what it was, and it would be by someone like Terumasa Hino, a Japanese trumpeter, or Ryo Kawasaki, the guitarist. These were more in a fusion/jazz funk vibe from the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it sounded interesting; I also started to pick up records made in Japan by American artists like Herbie Hancock, so this got my curiosity piqued; I knew there had been something special going on in Japan but didn’t know what.

This is all pre-internet, so I only had photocopied record dealer lists, and I’d start looking out for Japanese names, like Masabumi Kikuchi. The first album I got by him was Susto, an incredible fusion record. Still sounds mad. Then his One Way Traveller album, also albums like City Connection or Double Rainbow by Terumasa Hino. But these albums were relatively easy to find – still are. They had good distribution and had US releases. Some of these albums and tracks had already been picked up by the UK jazz funk and jazz dance scene in the late 1970s/early 1980s anyway by UK DJs like Chris Hill, Bob Jones, Colin Curtis, Chris Bangs, Paul Murphy, and others. I was a bit too young to go to clubs in ’78-84, so I came a bit late to these. By the time I picked them up, some DJs had already been into them for 15 years. But even so, it was only a handful of records, and generally, the dancey, funky/samba infused stuff aimed at a heaving – often competitive – dance floor, not the deeper spiritual/modal/free stuff that I’m more into now. Those records tended to stay in Japan and were quickly deleted, so very few ever heard them upon initial release.

Mike Peden: I have been buying records for as long as I can remember – mainly rock and progressive stuff in my early teens and then sold the lot as I left school in the mid-70s and got heavily into the soul boy scene, buying everything from jazz funk to fusion to disco. The club scene in the UK played a lot of jazz funk in the late 70s – Donald Byrd, Ronnie Laws, Charles Earland, Chick Corea, Jeff Lorber, which I loved, especially the fusion side of jazz, and I tried to find the DJs that played that sort of stuff. Chris Bangs was one, and, fortunately for me, a resident DJ at a Bournemouth club where he used to knock me up amazing music cassettes – it was on these that I first came across Japanese fusion of the early 80s, with artists such as Sadao Watanabe, Mikio Masuda, Himiko Kikuchi and Hiroshi Fukumara. At the time, Japanese jazz funk was a big thing in the UK championed by DJs such as Chris Hill and Jeff Young.

I dug deeper and found my way to Paul Murphy's legendary sessions at The Electric Ballroom in London where I was blown away by what he played – especially all the heavy Latin and 500 mph samba bangers – but it was hearing Terumasa Hino's “Merry Go Round” from his Double Rainbow LP that really set me off on my Japanese jazz odyssey. I'd never heard anything quite like it, an uncompromising fusion of mad cap jazz and funk but with a raw experimental edge very much influenced by the electric Miles Davis sound of the early 70s. The whole album was great, and I noticed it was arranged by a keyboard player named Masabumi Kikuchi, so I tracked down his Susto album, which was equally nuts, and so it began. This would be around the mid-80s, and in those pre-internet days, finding quality Japanese jazz wasn't easy, although it would turn up from time to time in second hand stores here in the UK and on my yearly digging trips to the US as well on various mailing lists. I had amassed a very good quality but relatively small collection of Japanese jazz including a lot of the Three Blind Mice label. But once the internet came into being, this expanded fast, and I really started to go deep into Japan and its jazz history, but that's another story.

LITA: How did this series come about and how long did it take to put the book together? Are there any special stories that you remember in the process?

Tony: It just started with Mike and I sharing the music, discussing tracks like most music nerds. During the early to mid-2000s, Mike had been running a great music blog that I followed, and we connected via that. After meeting and sharing music for a while, we both thought a compilation could be done with the tracks we liked. I think we came up with the idea during a visit to a local retailer of victuals and libations – a pub.

I’d done comps before of British jazz with Gilles Peterson, but this was very different. It was basically impossible for us to do it alone, so I approached BBE (at the time, they were based in the town I lived in) with the idea, and they went for it. It started with Mike and I writing down a list of tracks we’d like to include, a kind of wish list really. You try and ensure that the tracks are not all one style because you’re attempting to reflect a wide range of artists across a 15-year period. There’s no point putting on 12 fast, heavy fusion sambas, which would be quite easy to do, actually. In a way, you want to build in a set of gears into the comp, changes of pace and texture, allow the ears to recover, revive, and retune. If it was all free or fast, it’d be quite dull in some ways. The final wish list is sent to BBE Music and then passed on to our guy in Japan, Ken Hidaka, who does all the license coordination. He deals directly with the copyright holders. Without him, a project like this would be impossible. Once the copyright holder is identified, they are contacted, have the project explained to them, and a license is requested. Terms are discussed and – hopefully – agreed [to], then that’s it. It’s on the comp. Mike and I had an initial hit list of about 35 tracks that we whittled down to about 20. With 20, it gives you some headroom so that if several tracks are refused, you can still hopefully walk away with a reasonable amount, say 12-15. Sadly, some really killer stuff wasn’t able to be included because the copyright holders declined or their terms were impossible.

We had no idea if it would be a success as it hadn’t really been done before, not outside Japan anyway. We were quite taken aback by its impact. So that inspired us to do Vol 2, then 3, etc. Also, we decided to reissue the full albums in the J Jazz Masterclass Series. It just made sense to make the whole albums available again. The first was Tachibana, a rare private press LP recorded by students. A really fabulous record that sort of represents everything we love about this music – exemplary playing, passion, obscurity, rarity, excellence, and a crazy backstory.

Along the way, it’s been amazing to connect with some of the artists. In September 2019, composer and pianist Masahiko Sato and drummer Takeo Moriyama came over to the UK to play a gig in London. I hooked them up with two members of Ill Considered, bassist Leon Brichard and saxophonist Idris Rahman. We recorded the show, and it’s just come out on BBE, Live at Café Oto. So for Mike and I, it was incredible to meet Sato-san and Moriyama-san, both absolute legends and master musicians, real geniuses. I don’t use those words lightly, by the way. A real privilege to be in their presence. Very humble and modest men. Of course, I was a total fan boy. Probably annoyed the hell out of them.

The book was a natural outflow from the J Jazz albums. Mike and I have loads of jazz books, including sleeve art books, so we thought, “Why don’t we do one?” We have all these albums; we could do it. So, we just pitched it to BBE, and they went for it, their first book. Kind of amazed nobody had done it before. From the initial idea to publication, it was about three years in total. We worked closely with the book designer, Jake Holloway, who also does all the J Jazz compilations and albums, so massive thanks to him. Also to Philip Arneill, whose photos of jazz kissas from the Tokyo Jazz Joints project he does with James Catchpole adorn the covers of the J Jazz compilations. Check out their book; it’s great.

Mike: I was running a jazz blog from 2006 for about 12 years, sharing my love of jazz and related music which became very popular worldwide, and one of my specialities was Japanese jazz. Tony got in touch with me about this shared niche passion, and we would spend hours talking about the merits of different albums, musicians, labels, and obi strips. During a lengthy pub crawl, the idea of a Japanese Jazz compilation was born. We both put together our dream list of tracks and set some inclusion criteria: must be Japanese artists & labels /not available or long out of print / realistic to license/ top quality music. After a (very!) long period of discussion, we pulled together a list of tracks which even now is extremely groundbreaking and very deep – hence the title of the comp. Tony shopped the compilation around, and BBE Records were very interested, and after hearing it, they gave the project a green light. That’s when the really hard work started!

The book was a natural extension of the J Jazz Masterclass Series and compilation projects, something we had been discussing for years. Both of us have long been fans of thumbnail album art books, which are hugely popular in Japan, as well as LP cover publications from labels like Blue Note, CTI, and MPS, so, it felt natural to combine these two concepts and create the world’s first book showcasing full-size Japanese album cover art.

LITA: Can you provide some insight into those early days of post-war Japan and how the sounds and style of jazz evolved over the following decades in Japan?

Tony: Well, it needs to be remembered what an astonishingly successful project of rebuilding Japan achieved after WW2. I mean a physical as well as psychological and political rebuilding. We’re talking about a nation utterly defeated in war, totally destroyed. Massive fire bombing, two atomic bombs, around 3.5 million deaths. That’s about 4% of the population. By comparison, British deaths in WW2 were about 500,000 – about 0.9% of the population. The sheer effort and will to rebuild and achieve the level of economic power they did is extraordinary. In a very modest way, jazz played its part in providing a soundtrack and cultural vehicle to shed the martial culture of the old imperial order and embrace a more outward-looking worldview. The obsession with western culture – especially music, clothes, and movie culture – was a form of soothing balm that gave large sections of Japan – particularly the younger generation – a focus away from school, work, and the horrific recent past.

Japan was occupied by the Allies – mainly US forces – for nearly a decade after WW2. So many of the Japanese jazz artists performed on US bases playing all manner of styles: jump blues and bebop to black barracks – don’t forget the US armed forces were racially segregated at this time, and the white officers might get more straight ahead and mainstream or West Coast cool. Southern US regiments might even get Texas swing and such like. So the Japanese players became very versatile in their repertoire and eager to learn all the new chops. By the mid to late 50s, Japanese players were being recognised as serious talent, like pianist Toshio Alkioshi who went to Berklee Music College and ended up playing with Mingus. Most of the Japanese musicians emulated the Americans in their playing styles and even clothes – Ivy league jackets, shoes, button-down shirts, etc. Tours by Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and others were hugely popular, and hard bop by Japanese artists like Hideo Shiraki, Hidehiko Matsumoto, The Big Four, and others was very popular. But that changed in the mid-1960s; as it was a creative dead end, a radical change was needed. So Saxophonist Sadao Watanabe returned from study in the US and set up a school, and he became a crucial figure guiding the next generation like keyboard player Masabumi Kikuchi and trumpeter Terumasa Hino, two names who became central to the development of the post-modal progressive jazz scene of the late 1960s and mid-1970s that gave way to the massive fusion scene. Tracks became longer, more open and free, [with] more use of electric instruments, especially Fender Rhodes piano and various effects. Some of the music got very trippy and freeform but often with a groove, too. Alongside this was all the free jazz bursting out from around 1969 onwards by the likes of Yosuke Yamashita, Masayuki Takayanagi, Masahiko Sato, Kaoru Abe, and Masahiko Togashi. So it was an incredibly febrile environment that produced an astonishing amount and range of music.

There were also many small indie and private labels that sprung up around this time like Three Blind Mice, Johnny’s Disk, Union, Aketa, ALM, and many others as well as major labels issuing some heavy stuff that you could not imagine being released today. Labels like Nippon Columbia and Nippon Phonogram put out lots of commercial material but also some of the very best free and progressive jazz. Rock jazz fusion became very popular in Japan in the 1970s and early 1980s, but there were still lots of young artists issuing acoustic jazz records even at the height of fusion. We have reissued some of them, like Sasaki Hideto - Sekine Toshiyuki Quartet + 1 Stop Over, recorded in 1976 and only had 100 copies pressed, but it sounds like a classic Kenny Dorham LP. Another, the Tachibana LP I mentioned earlier, or Shintaro Quintet’s Evolution, a great modal album from 1984. It was like a counter reaction to all the amps and guitars!

However, by the mid to late 1970s, things had changed in Japan. They experienced a recession following the oil crisis, and things turned a bit grim for a while. However, as ever, things turned around, and by the early 1980s, there was a boom in electronics, miniaturisation, technological consumer goods, and well-engineered and efficient cars. They all emerged as key defining products from Japan. It was another period of success, and the music reflected some of this – slick, well-produced, optimistic but sometimes also possibly saccharine and pallid. This was the era of City Pop, a distinctive Japanese AOR/soft funk-soul hybrid that became huge and is undergoing something of a cultural rehabilitation at the moment. Several Japanese artists worked extensively overseas or even relocated to America. For example, Terumasa Hino and Masabumi Kikuchi. Kikuchi ended up living in New York. I spoke to him not long before he died and interviewed Hino-san for the J Jazz book. He also wrote the foreword, a great honour.

LITA: For new listeners, what's unique about jazz in Japan compared to sounds that we've often heard in North America and Europe?

Tony: Hard to pin that down, to be honest. There’s no real objective metric. All I can say is that Japanese jazz – especially the music produced from the mid-1960s to the mid to late 1980s – is of the highest quality in terms of the playing, the production and press, and the packaging. Of course, there is amazing sounding US jazz, like Blue Note being the classic example, and in Europe, MPS and ECM. But those exemplary labels and their standard are like the basic entry level in Japan. Even the smallest private and indie jazz labels in Japan can match or exceed ECM, etc, in terms of fidelity. Every link in the chain – the playing, the recording, the cutting, the mastering, the press, and the artwork – all of it is of the very highest standard. Even the “worst”-sounding Japanese jazz record is better than the majority of US and European jazz records. I’ll stand by that statement.

The other thing is that Japanese players are far more versatile in their playing styles, particularly musicians who emerged from the late 50s onwards. They had to be to survive in the competitive world of Japanese jazz. So what you get – especially among rhythm players – is an ability to play across all styles and do it really well, to a very high calibre. So, a drummer, pianist, or bass player will play a blues, or funk, or modal, hard hop, swing, ballads and standards, jazz funk, fusion, Latin, spiritual jazz, post-bop, mainstream, free flesh tearing stuff – you name it, they can play it. Dixieland, whatever it is. They do it all extremely well. You just don’t get that in the US or Europe, not to the same degree. It’s no great surprise that so many American jazz artists recorded for Japanese labels in the 1970s. Names like Herbie Hancock, Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy, and others made some of their best albums in or solely for Japan.

Mike: For me, Japanese jazz began to evolve in the 1950s and 1960s as musicians often emulated the funky and hard bop styles from the U.S. Over time, this foundation transitioned into the more experimental fusion, rock, and free jazz movements of the 1970s, where these musicians discovered their own style and voice. Renowned for their technical precision, they mastered traditional jazz forms before infusing them with their own innovations. During this transformative period, they developed a distinctive sound that blended local elements—such as Japanese scales and rhythms—with traditional and avant-garde aspects of Western jazz, resulting in a style that feels both unique and resonant.

It must also be said [that] Japanese jazz albums are rightly celebrated for their exceptional recording quality, reflecting a strong emphasis on audio fidelity and meticulous attention to detail. Musicians and producers utilized top-notch recording equipment, with many albums featuring inserts that detail studio setups including the specific microphones used. Coupled with high-quality packaging, striking artwork, and the signature obi strip, these albums offer a product that is remarkably unique compared to those from the rest of the world.

LITA: What are your top 5 essential Japanese jazz LPs?

Tony Higgins: (in no particular order)

Masabumi Kikuchi Sextet with Sadao Watanabe Quartet Collaboration (Philips)

Tohru Aizawa Quartet Tachibana Vol 1 (Tachibana)

Kohsuke Ichihara Departure (CBS/Sony)

Takehiro Honda Salaam Salaam (East Wind)

Mal Waldron & Terumasa Hino Reminicent Suite (Victor)

Mike Peden: (in no particular order)

Yoshio Kuniyasu Thermal (Take-Ya)

Hiromasa Suzuki Rock Joint Biwa (RCA)

Miho Kei Jazz Eleven Kokezaru Kumikyoku (MCA)

Masahiko Sato & Soundbreakers Amalgamation (Liberty)