This article was published on Financial Times Chinese website
Mature basement jazz bars should probably look like this at Intro. The heavy stainless steel door, suspected to have been moved from the back of the kitchen, opens to the waist of the space. Once inside, it’s symmetrical from side to side, a long, open room with a bar and restroom on the left. A couple of small round tables and chairs are on the right side, with a grand piano at one end of the end. The drum kit was at the other end. The double bass was in front of it, and the player’s back had to be pressed against the wall to leave room for the saxophonist in front. Sometimes a second saxophonist, the singer, squeezes in, and the trumpet player is a bit of a pain in the ass, needing to sit on the seat and get up to cock the trumpet when it’s time to play. In short, the arrangement was like a jigsaw puzzle stuck together. For improvisation, this tight connection may be just what the players want.
Apparently, cramped spaces don’t have aisles, or crevices are aisles. This causes two problems; one is that there’s no way to get to the restroom when it’s as crowded as a fish in a can. The other is that the players who have finished the show have to run outside, sit on the stairs either against a wall or in a crouch, and light a cigarette to melt away the emotions that have just been unleashed too much in the music.
At the top are various pipes that are more of an economic necessity than an industrial style of decorating. All the walls were full. On either side were horizontal shelves, stacked high with mostly film records. There were about a dozen jazz records hanging on the wall directly across from the door. Of course, I didn’t recognize any of them. I just thought the half-naked woman lying on a toffee couch with a saxophone in her hand on the cover of the record was very retro, very Freudian.
When I first pushed open the door, it was full of people. The older man in the blue bowtie calmly confirmed that there were six of us and then blasted the customers at two tables up and herded them to stand at the bar to make room for us. I sat down and saw a red-lit tape recorder propped up next to me. I don’t like basements, much less crowded ones. It did get a little suffocating the moment I went in. The good thing was that the drinks were cheap and basement. Beer, cocktails or drinks, whatever they are, are 1,000 yen for the first one and 500 yen for the next, which is roughly equivalent to RMB 50 and 25.
In Takadanobaba, Waseda University area, this kind of spending is affordable for college students.
The players were playing in shifts. Just sit down and act as an audience before and after the show, or duck out into the aisle between the negative floor and the first floor to smoke, drink beer, and riff. In front of us sat an elderly couple with white hair dressed in outdoor clothing, the older woman’s body swaying lightly, both hands clapping in the air. I didn’t realize for a moment the two men were up there too. The wife was the pianist and the old man played drums. After a few rounds of performances, I started to record a video and gave it to the old man. I was not a jazz fan. Old Chang was.
Lao Zhang is the owner of a bar in Songzhuang Xiaobao Village. The bar is called Corner, and as the name suggests, it is indeed located in a corner with a food street at the back, which I call Songzhuang Guijie. A few years ago I was walking around the village and caught their opening show. I chatted with him and learned that he used to be a member of the media, a musician, and was familiar with the jazz scene in Beijing. Later I went to his place to listen to jazz a few times, how can I say, I didn’t understand, I didn’t feel, I didn’t know where to start.
Corner has a little stage that you can go up and play on and just hang out. I’ve been to Corner a few times with some of my neighbors. The ones who could play went up there with their electric guitars and basses, and I got up there with my African drums and played a 4-beat base tone that was pretty solid. When my daughter was 3 or 4 years old, she was just like me, babbling and improvising into the microphone. At that time I thought, this kind of thing is probably hard to happen in a bar in Sanlitun.
One time I went to the door and was also slightly drunk. Old Chang had his electric guitar and was playing with us. I just knew that he helped jazz musicians put out CDs in the 90s, but I didn’t know that he was down there himself. Lao Zong was sitting on the stage playing and fiddling with the bass, while I was thinking about how to follow the drums in. Suddenly Lao Zong strummed some strings, and instantly it all felt right, some chemicals were suddenly released in the back of my neck and spine, and my whole body was happy and comfortable. That kind of life experience was something I had almost never felt before, clear and magical, as if the body and the music merged together, thinking ceased to exist, and the Plato in the head was overturned. The body becomes a plant, swaying to the wind of the music. And this wind is logical, sensible, causal, and echoes. A few people get excited, ferment each other, and something happens that only exists in the moment.
When you’re over forty, music is probably a very important thing. When you are young, your physical and mental state is at its peak, and your family has fewer constraints, so you can go crazy and satisfy your dopamine hunger. When you reach the age when you’ve more or less seen it all, the cost of life experiences skyrockets, the risks are high, and the benefits plummet. For the average person, the sense of hearing is probably one of the easiest of all senses to reach the deepest part of the body and mind. Listening to music to pleasure oneself is extremely cost-effective. That’s why I’m grateful to Lao Zhang. Even if I’m still not hooked on jazz. But that time I did feel the remarkable thing about jazz.
After watching the video I posted, Lao Chang said they were at a high level. That’s not a surprise. Some things are not over the head, listening to what the body feels is accurate. You don’t have to invoke your brain’s knowledge of music or jazz to decode the notes. It’s all intuition. It’s all about the free expression of the living, in a distinctly different style. Sometimes I felt that the performers were just messing around, and I was so infected that I laughed out loud and realized that the whole room was laughing too, including the waiter wearing a bow tie. Later, I realized that the two waiter uncles were also musicians. One was a saxophonist and the other played the drums.
My favorite part of the show was a saxophonist with glasses and dyed yellow hair who looked like a square-faced Japanese version of David Bowie. He was playing saxophone with another foreigner, one after the other. His music was even more interesting, with a demonic spirit and humor in it that was indescribably painful. On my second visit, I heard him add Nirvana’s famous unplugged music to one of his tunes, and close with an Indiana Jones movie interlude, which drew laughs.
Just a few days ago, the circle of friends in the hot topic of artificial intelligence chatgpt. I did not hold back to ask a person artificial intelligence can improvise jazz. He thought it could. I wondered what kind of algorithm it would take to get Nirvana and Indiana Jones into a jazz band. I don’t think Uncle Yellow Hair himself could replicate it. How can you convolutionally compute the emotion of riding a wave?
Luckily, there was an internet signal in the basement. Hearing such an amazing jazz improv wheelbarrow show. I rushed to look up the information. Turns out Intro has been around since the 1970s. It’s always been here. There was a commemorative CD and t-shirt for the 40th anniversary two years ago. That t-shirt was hanging over my head. It felt pretty brown when I ran my hand over it.
A basement bar that has survived for 40 years and is still doing business today with a guest price of less than a hundred RMB. I don’t know how they’ve solved the challenges of landlord price hikes, forced demolitions, and epidemic control. I told Lao Zhang that if Corner could live for 40 years, it would probably look like this. He sent me a video, 7 minutes of the scene. Luckily, they’re still playing.
If I were to make a recommendation to someone, I would make going to Intro as the NO.1 must-see in Tokyo, because it realizes the deepest connection between people and the city, the connection between mind and body, the connection between the living, which is much more rewarding than going to a museum to look at the knowledge and specimens of dead things. Space is a magical thing, like the soil of culture. Different things grow in different spaces, including the space itself. The fact that Tokyo can grow such a music space, such an “underground” music hall, is a remarkable thing about Tokyo.
I naturally think of my hometown. Two days ago, Lara’s radio station, Houhai Qianjie, opened, and one installment was a chat with Huang Yong, founder of the Nine Gates Jazz Festival. I’m ashamed to say that I realized that Beijing had some amazing musical soil back in the day. I’ll have to go and listen to it sometime in the future. Make up for it.
Two weeks ago, after a 20-hour journey, I started to get jet lagged and swiped through short videos at midnight when I couldn’t sleep to the love of my life. This 20-year old song, which I had been listening to for 20 years, somehow suddenly electrified me again. In that moment I suddenly realized that Hong Kong is, in fact, quite an amazing place.
By the way, that day at Intro, I got drunk after the second cocktail. At that time, I thought how happy I would be if I died in a place like this, going to the end of my life in physical and mental pleasure.
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