Category: Photographs

I wrote about the end of record digging in Japan in my NPR column earlier this year. This trip didn’t change my assessment.

We dutifully made it through Tokyo’s multidude of shops, marveling how those closets could stay in business selling Tommy Roe and Roy Ayers albums for more than a couple bucks. Fillmore didn’t disappoint – it never does – but the days of finding a Marvin Whoremonger are long gone. Can’t front on unplayed copies of Indonesian psych treasures like Freedom of Rhapsodia’s first album though.

The best shops, as usual, were the Disc Union stores… the amount of records circulating through their doors is impressive.

I came close to buying the Tenorio Jr. and the Booker Pittman albums until I realized that, no matter how good they are, spending $1000 on bossa-jazz just ain’t happening in 2009.

Cut, for his part, did well at Disc Union’s Shibuya store, as the “rare-groove” manager offered him a stab at his personal collection.

It took a twenty four hour deliberation – and some tense negotiating – but Cut walked back to our hotel at the tail end of the typhoon with a copy of Billy Ball and The Upsetters “Sissy Walk.” Not bad!

The best digging of the trip? Digging for knives in the Tsukijji fish market at dawn:

Now THAT’s how we get down in Tokyo. Leave the records for the aging b-boys. Let’s take home some Japanese steel.

There’s something to be said about running into random folks in a train station, in a country far away from your own, being recognized, and asked for an autograph on a flyer for the show you did the previous night. It doesn’t happen to me anywhere outside of Japan, but here, as commonplace as it is (sounds weird to write that), it’s pretty damn cool each and every time.

The Japanese rail system is no joke: the trains arrive and depart on time, hurtle around banked curves at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour, and are the most comfortable way to travel the country. As Cut and I discussed whether or not Tokyo would surpass our admittedly high expectations – and the surefire pratfalls to come – I broke out my computer and finished the licensing paperwork for my man Uchenna to bring to Nigeria on Tuesday to finalize the deals for a forthcoming comp. Cut slept, fitfullly it seemed. Japanese jetlag is the worst.

The Japanese countryside is bugged out. If not the Sanyo Solar Ark (or whatever the hell that Brazil-nut looking thing is a few hundred kilometers outside of Osaka), it’s a giant ferris wheel.

Arriving in Tokyo – on time of course – we met up with Take, long time friend and co-promoter of every Stones Throw show I’ve done in Japan. We went straight to soundcheck where a miffed Cut realized he would be set up in a booth. “Oh hell no. That’s not happening,” he fumed to the staff. “I haven’t DJed in a booth since, uh, 1993? I’m sorry. Get a stage.”

Tell you what – there was a stage set up in front of that booth (dangerously close to the sub woofers, but, you know, Cut’s choice of poison I suppose) in about twenty minutes.

The show? Well, let me say it was probably the best show I’ve been a part of in Tokyo. There were some contenders – the one I remember most vividly was the one with Madlib, Karriem Riggins and J.Rocc in 2007 – but this one was just damn. good. and. fun. There wasn’t one song that the crowd of 600 didn’t dig. Obscure Minoru Muraoka modal jazz madness? Oh, there was a section clapping away on beat as if it were a Dilla beat or something. Man. Why can’t it always be like this? And why can’t it be like this in L.A.?

Cut paid the price for that stage set up – those stacked loops of his got progressively more distorted. But the crowd didn’t care, as they stared at the opposing screens when they couldn’t catch what he was doing up close and personal. What a routine. I can’t explain in words just how exciting it is to see him build those beats from scratch. DJ Muro was equally as impressed. “Just… Incredible,” he said, often repeating what seems to be his favorite adjective.

After his set, as the staff broke down the remnants of the stage, about 250 people remained on as I had the best time DJing I’d had since Funky Sole ended its run at Star Shoes in 2007 and I gave up on DJing on a regular basis. It was nearing dawn by the time I walked out of the venue’s doors and made my way back to Shibuya. By the time I reached my room on the 30th floor, the sun had emerged, gradually dispelling the grey clouds that had crept out overnight.

If it was only about buying the records, these trips to Japan would be almost too easy. By this point – about seven years after the first go ’round – we know our way around the larger of the country’s cities. At least the parts we’re always housed. A two hour soundcheck at the rather cavernous (as in floor to ceiling; the venue resembles a tall cigar box) Triangles club did nothing to maintain Cut’s single-turntable set up after the warm up band moved their equipment in to place. His rig is simple but it needs to actually work – one deck, plugged into a mixer, running through a loop-pedal on the floor (with two cameras focusing on the turntable and the floor piece) – in order for him to pull off the rather insane feat of building an entire set of ever-stacking loops for almost an hour.

We arrived at the venue around midnight. The main two floors – next to empty. The band on stage played, rather feverishly I noted, for an audience of twenty. In the lounge, three floors above the stage, Cut lambasted anyone in earshot as to the band’s all-too-eager commandeering of his rig. Some English (or was he Australian?) guy who was probably with the band tried to ascertain exactly what was going wrong. “What exactly did you say, my man?” Cut’s not a nice guy when he suspects that the night might be over before it starts.

Lucky for him, Kota was able to go find everyone necessary (it always seems to take about five Japanese dudes having a conversation to get something done, especially when there’s a problem), fix Cut’s set up, and put the man at ease before I worked my way on stage. The space had filled in by that point and, surprisingly, Osaka’s cognescenti (well, I’d like to think they are!) was in to a set of Arabic and Meditteranean beat-heavy psychedelic belly-dance music (with the obligatory Sarah Webster Fabio and Key and Cleary joints thrown in for good measure).

By the time Cut took the, uh, turnable and explained what he was about to do, the crowd was so damn WITH it that he could do no wrong. Not that he did. His one turntable routine is a sight to behold – each song coming together from fragments of 45s from the Sudan, beats from Malaysia, yelps from Colombia – and, of course, an aural delight. I sat behind the table, trying to catch what the fuck he was doing through the cigarette smoke. Over the course of an hour, he erred not once. By the time he was done with his set, playing “Curse Upon The World” by Apple and 3 Oranges and lamenting “sounds like something homey wrote on the way to jail” about Ed “Apple” Nelson’s woeful L.A. funk masterpiece, I was hanging from the rafters, literally, coaxing the last bits of champagne from the bottle I’d opened earlier that eve.