Last night after work, I’d arranged to meet a few friends at the Tokyo blues carnival. When I left work, the sky was swelling like it might burst at any moment. I took the Subway three stations, and walked through long underground corridors, seeing no one at all. I went out the Hibiya Park exit, and experienced one of the coolest outdoor sonic experiences of my life. The park seemed to be me to my left, and to my right across the street were a bunch of office buildings, but the music distinctly sounded like it was coming from the right side. So, I crossed the street – when I got to the other side, it sounded like the music was coming from the left side – and so I crossed again, and again it sounded like the music was coming from the right sound. And then, I began to wonder if there were two bands. What with the bursting clouds and all, the distant drums sounded like the greatest thunder I’ve ever heard. Some kind of fantastic effect box the downtown office core of any big city could become, don’t you think?
In the end, I stuck with the left direction. I walked around the corner, and my three Japanese friends/students were emerging from a group of bushes, where they’d been watching the concert from the outside. We were planning on watching from the outside, because tickets were 6800 Yen (about $60 US). Crazy. What other country would spend this much on concerts? My friends had bought 4 tickets from scalpers, but they’d been ripped off. Two of the tickets were missing the bottom part attached by the perforated edge. And these scalped tickets cost 5000 Yen apiece. But whatever, with the last act of the night already in progress, we all got into the amphitheatre space.
Buddy Guy, the great blues guitarist, was playing. I knew him only by name before this. What a star this guy is – I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never been to a blues concert before, but this guy seemed like kind of a god, the way he controlled each note being sent forth into the night sky. Him and his band did a few impressions of other players, including a perfect few minutes of John Lee Hooker. The Japanese crowd, so politely kept out of the aisles, so we could run down, and get right in front of the stage. Then, the rain started to fall, and as if he was waiting for that moment, Guy dramatically let an extended moment of silence pass by, and then went into the most gorgeous soul song I’ve heard in my life crooning “It Feels Like Rain”, and lonely, sparse playing rippled out through the park. And the song went on, searing and burning up, and spasming at times, like cold water poured onto hot coals. And Guy went deep into the audience, still playing. And the rain fell harder. And I just thought to myself, how fucking cool, how fucking absolutely cool this is.
After the show, we took a taxi to an Ichigaya office building, driving along the old moat that surrounds the Imperial Palace in the central part of Tokyo. We drank beer, and my friends took turns playing the guitar, in this 12th floor office with this wicked anime-esque view of the city scene below. As a very late birthday gift, one of my friends gave me this CD, a Yazoo compilation of St. Louis blues from 1929-1933 – but the CD comes in the strangest packaging I’ve ever seen. Somehow, I forgot that CDs were once so wonderfully packaged. The CD is in this long box, the same height as a record – I took it for granted that record stores had to rearrange their shelf space when CDs first came out. I don’t want to break the cellophane wrap, because this strange elongated rectangular box appears to me like some distant medium unrealized, containing some wonderful mystery.
Maybe CDs are better left in their package. The problem with music today is that it’s too easily acquired. We forget that the listener makes the music complete. You’ve got to stop hiding in your record collection, and start letting it live through you.
My friends showed me some basic chords on the guitar. Up until now, it’s been a complete mystery how anyone gets any sounds of it. I’m thinking of buying a guitar now. My friend told me, if I played every day for a few hours, in one month, it wouldn’t be a problem to play “Love Me Tender.”
I remember seeing these pianos in the lobby of a Disneyland resort hotel that played themselves. As if there was a ghost sitting on the bench, you could see the keys rising and falling, pressed by some invisible fingers. And I thought, why learn an instrument at all, when it can be all automated? But it’s all too perfect – an automated piano is never going to make a mistake, an unexpected note is never going to appear, it’s never going to be able to respond to the changing atmosphere of the audience that surrounds it. It’s without intrigue. Which is why, even in the case of Jelly Roll Morton, I haven’t enjoyed piano rolls so much. Because they are fatalist pieces of music – their fate already sealed in plastic.
Let’s not forget one thing – recorded music was until the studio-as-instrument-age nothing more than air trapped.
Music ought to be a thing at least as moody as the weather.