Box of delight

“Man,” a fellow working the checkout counter at Los Angeles’ Amoeba Music once said to me, “you sure do like Japanese jazz.” His tone was one of faint disbelief, but then, this particular record-shopping trip happened well over a decade ago. Since then the global listenership of Japanese jazz has increased enormously, thanks to the expansion of audiovisual streaming platforms and the enterprising collectors and curators who’ve used them to share the glory of the most American of all art forms as mastered and re-interpreted by dedicated musicians in the Land of the Rising Sun.

If you were to ask me “What is jazz?” I wouldn’t presume to know the answer, and I’m not sure any single composition exists to which one could point to as an ideal type. Maybe the only thing I’m certain of when it comes to jazz is---to quote Wallace Stevens---“it must change.”

When Ella Fitzgerald took the stage for the first time at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, “we heard a sound so perfect” that the entire theater went silent, says dancer and choreographer Norma Miller. “You could hear a rat piss on cotton.” Fitzgerald was 17 years old, and she had already faced severe racial discrimination. “Everything was race,” says Miller, describing the de facto segregation in Harlem in the 20s and 30s. “You couldn’t go out of your zone… slavery is over, but you don’t have jobs. So the confinement meant you had to do for yourself.”

Jazz has inspired a great many things, and a great many things have inspired jazz, and more than a few of the music’s masters have found their aspiration by looking — or listening — to the divine. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they subscribe to traditional religion. As befits this naturally eclectic music that grew from an inherently eclectic country before it internationalized, its players tend to have an eclectic conception of the divine.