⌈ J Jazz Book - Free and Modern Jazz Albums is a monographic album dedicated to LP album covers. It focuses on the period of 1954 – 1988, selected by the authors, and a musical style of their choice referred to as “free and modern jazz,” i.e., a trend in modern jazz that originated and developed in the 1960s. ⌋

There is NEVER TOO MUCH INFORMATION ON THE AUDIO WORLD in Japan. This is because there is surprisingly little of it in non-Japanese languages. There is only one such interesting publication in my collection – William Minor's memoir of his trip to Japan, published in 2004 (!), titled Jazz Journeys to Japan (The University of Michigan Press). Therefore, when searching for information related to publishers, musicians or techniques related to recording material or releasing it, I often find...my own texts. It’s as if I have become some kind of “local access” to information on this fascinating world.

So, the appearance of the J Jazz Book - Free and Modern Jazz Albums book by TONY HIGGINS and MIKE PEDEN in stores is important and deserves our attention. It's not even because it's such a big book including so many cover photos, but because of the essays that accompany them. However, all these things don't hinder it, but rather help it, justifying its high price – in Poland you can get the book on order for about PLN 500.

As announced on the BBE Music website:

BBE Music is thrilled to present J Jazz: Free and Modern Jazz From Japan 1954-1988, a remarkable large-format book covering some of the deepest, rarest, and most innovative jazz music released anywhere in the post-war era. Compiled by Tony Higgins and Mike Peden, co-curators of BBE Music's acclaimed J Jazz Masterclass Series, the book also features a foreword by Japanese jazz icon, Terumasa Hino.

This is the first time a book of this type has been published outside of Japan and the first anywhere of this size and scale. It is a unique collection of over 500 albums of free and modern jazz recorded and released in Japan during a period of radical transformation and constant reinvention. An era that saw Japan return from the ravages of World War Two to become a global economic power and emerge as both a technological leader and an international cultural force.

⸜ → bbemusic.BANDCAMP.com https://bbemusic.bandcamp.com/album/j-jazz-free-and-modern-jazz-albums-from-japan-1954-1988 , accessed: 30.01.2025.

▌ The authors

THE AUTHORS of J JAZZ… are not only music fans and record collectors. Tony Higgins, as stated in his bio on the publisher's website, has been interested in music since the early 1980s, when, “thinking himself very grown up in his first years at secondary school, he donned Sta Prest trousers and monkey boots and bought Two Tone and Jam singles.” (more → HERE).

After completing his postgraduate studies, Tony worked for a few years for the music management department of a record label alongside artists, songwriters and rock, dance and pop music producers, including Mike Hedges, Arthur Baker and Rick Nowells. Thanks to the experience, he went on to work with the radio and club DJ Gilles Peterson, and together they prepared the two Impressed LP compilations with rare British jazz. The next step for Tony was writing articles for the music press.

After leaving the record label, Tony started working for the BBC on music documentaries, such as Jazz Britannia and Seven Ages of Rock. According to the website, he also produced 10 Commandments of Country, a live concert filmed in Los Angeles with multi-Grammy wining Emmylou Harris. Today, apart from his journalistic work, Higgins works as a music consultant for a few labels, including Universal Music, advising on “reissues and archive projects and provides sleeve notes to reissues of rare albums”. He is also an avid collector of 78rpm discs with jazz from the 1930s-50s.

Tony also started cooperating with BBE Records, the record label which is part of BBE Music. The Barely Breaking Even company was set up in 1996 by Peter Adarkwah and started as a London night club, taking its name after the Universal Robot Band disco album. In the 1990s, the label released disco and dance music, while in the 2000s it also opened up towards jazz and ethno music. One of his latest undertakings is the “J Jazz Masterclasses” publishing series, in which rare, often never re-issued albums with Japanese jazz music selected by Tony and Mike Peden are released, referred to by the record label as “deeply modal. spiritual and fusion”. It is thanks to contacts made via his blog that Mike started traveling to Japan.

PPeden plays an extremely important role in this duo – he collects Japanese jazz on LPs. To share his love for music, he set up the well-known internet music blog Orgy in Rhythm devoted to jazz. His posts have been viewed a few million times already, and the place has become an internet forum for collectors, DJs, fans and jazz lovers. According to the label’s website:

Mike’s vinyl philosophy is that happiness is digging, satisfaction is finding. He started collecting records as a teen in the early 70s and amassed a huge collection of prog rock, before selling the lot after getting into the mid-70s jazz funk scene, soon becoming a regular face at the all-dayers, weekenders and record shops which were associated with it.

(…) Mike joined forces with Bob Povey (Bump ‘n’ Hustle) to create Funky Fusion, a weekly session at Bournemouth’s infamous Midnight Express club. He continued to play hard core Latin and jazz at clubs on the south coast and, as his knowledge of the jazz dance scene and records grew, this prompted him to continue to expand an ever growing collection. He was soon buying and selling music to others and this lit travel bug to find new and rare records from all over the world.

⸜ Tony Higgins & Mike Peden, → BBEMUSIC.com, accessed: 31.01.2025.

In order to share its knowledge about rare Japanese jazz, the BBE Records label released their own vinyl compilation J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz from Japan 1969-1984 in 2018. The “J Jazz” series is its “spin-off”. The first album was Tachibana Vol. 1 by TOHRU AIZAWA QUARTET (2018). Discogs lists 49 titles that have been issued so far; more → HERE. Each release gets an exact reproduction of the original artwork, with inserts and an obi strip, as well as new updated notes on the cover, and is available on vinyl, CD and for digital download.

J Jazz Book - Free and Modern Jazz Albums From Japan 1954 - 1988 is supposed to be an addition to the album series and its equivalent in the literature world.

▌ The publication

THE BOOK UNDER REVIEW, on its 392 pages, presents the development of jazz in Japan from the beginnings of the modern jazz scene in the mid-to-late 1950s, through the hard bop and modal jazz of the 1960s. As we read, it “moves the reader towards the radical directions of the 1970s , when free jazz, fusion, post-bop and jazz-funk opened up a growing number of Japanese jazz artists to a new global audience, before consolidating in the mid-to-late 1980s with a music scene that laid the foundation for the path followed by the modern generation of jazzmen.”

It features album cover photos of many of the key artists involved in shaping the postwar Japanese jazz scene, including Sadao Watanabe, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Masabumi Kikuchi, Masahiko Togashi, Terumasa Hino, Yosuke Yamashita, Fumio Itabashi, Masayuki Takayanagi, Takeo Moriyama, Isao Suzuki, and several leading record labels such as East Wind, Frasco, King Records and Nippon Columbia, as well as critical independent labels such as Three Blind Mice, ALM and Aketa's Disk.

The book also includes a chapter on albums by non-Japanese artists released only in Japan, with collectible, rare and little-known releases by the likes of Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy and Art Blakey. The person responsible for the album cover photos is Jan Letocha, a documentary filmmaker who had worked with the BBE record label already before, on two LP compilations. On this project, he cooperated with Jake Holloway, a designer who is also associated with cover designs for BBE Records.

The monograph has the so-called coffe book format, i.e., it is designed to be read at a table, preferably a coffee one. You can hold it in your lap, but it will be tiring – it measures 31 x 31 cm (12“ x 12”) and is 4 cm tall. Its main purpose is to introduce the graphic side of music releases from Japan, including covers, and the distinct culture associated with the so-called obi. A separate chapter is devoted to the latter. In addition to reproductions of graphics, there is something in it that seems to be its most important element, i.e., several essays on Japanese jazz.

It is necessary to mention the format of the book. Similarly to several other publications devoted to LPs, this one also has a square shape as a reference to vinyl releases. I will add here that this was also the decision behind the adoption of square covers by “High Fidelity", although everyone around was very sceptical about it. Some of these monographs have the size of 10” records, and others 12”, like the albums of the Taschen publishing house. There are also monographs of this type with classical proportions.

In the case of J jazz… the form and size of a 12” disc seem to be self-explanatory. To deepen the bond between the written word, photographs and music, the designers decided to attach a real obi strip to it. It is faded, as if it was decades old and has spent a long time in the sun – it looks great. The calligraphy on it was created by Eiko Ishida.

We should add that BBE Records' releases also feature obi strips, even though the publisher is based in the UK. Let me remind you that records from the Polish label AC Records also have obi strips, and you'll also find them on remasters from the “Polskie Nagrania Catalogue Selections” series; review of the latest release → HERE.

A CD with a selection of ten tracks from albums released so far by the record label is added to the book. It is slipped into a cardboard “pocket” attached to the back cover and is not very easy to pull out. In fact, there would be more “flavour” in including a vinyl single with the book. I say this from experience, as two volumes of Passion For Vinyl by Robert Haagsma were accompanied by 10” LPs and it looks great; Part I → HERE and Part II → HERE.

▌ Reading and viewing

WE START STRONG – the introduction to the monograph was written by Terumas Hino, one of the most important Japanese trumpeters of all times. Let me remind you that he was featured on the Tact Jazz Series records, a spin-off of Japan's Columbia, where he was recorded by Mr. OKIHIKO SUGANO, who would shortly thereafter start his own label, Audio Lab Records; more → HERE.

The first and also the longest article in the book is Jazz in Japan: A Pre-history by Higgins. The saga, which stretches for twenty-five long pages, is full of amazing stories, unknown facts and rarely raised issues. I'm sure it will be a kind of a “bible” for people like me, i.e., those listening to this kind of music, buying records and reviewing them. The only drawback, as far as I'm concerned, is the lack of a proper title page for this, very important, part.

There is such a page for the essay The Story of Tachibana, again by Higgins, but also with brief thoughts from the founder of this small but important label, Mr. Thoru Aizawa. The text is not very long, but really interesting. Unfortunately, it lacks information about the technical side of the recordings. And yet today we already know that it is an important component of a work of art in the form of a music recording, often as important as music in the reception of the work.

And this is perhaps my only complaint about the publication – the authors apparently are not knowledgeable about the sonic dimension of music. It is confirmed by the interesting, but most superficial of all, text about obi. Let me remind you that this is a strip worn on the cover of an album, on which information about a record was applied in Japanese – for a very long time in Japan very few people spoke English.

However, an obi is also a carrier of different information, for example, technical specifications. It gives you clues about how the album was recorded, what technical solutions were used by the sound engineers, but also how the particular record was pressed. It's a treasure trove of knowledge on the subject, and the authors seem not to notice it, as if this issue was “transparent” to them.

That is why I was not surprised that the description under the cover of the album Something by Steve Marcus Soul Media from January 1971, released by Nippon Japan (Denon), does not feature information that it is the first LP in the world with digitally recorded material; more about the digital techniques used by Denon → HERE.

However, before we get to the article on obi, on page 163 we meet Mr. Tadayuki Naitoh, one of the most important photographers of the Japanese, mostly jazz, musical stage. In the essay Jazz Through a Lens, preceded by a short artist bio by Higgins, he talks about his path to jazz music and the camera. He recalls several covers, also referenced in the photos, and tries to answer the question why he deals with music photography in the first place. It's a fascinating insight into the artist's soul.

Toward the end of the album, we come across an article that allows us to look at the issue of collecting jazz music through the eyes of Mats Gustaffson, a Swedish saxophonist. He recalls his fascination with Japanese jazz, mostly in free form. He also talks about rare editions and collector's dilemmas. The essay is not long, just under four pages (please remember that we're talking about a 12”x12” format), but it's just as interesting as the previous ones. It's very personal and subjective, but that's what makes it engaging and memorable. Ultimately, after all, that's what it's all about, passion, right?

The monograph by Higgins and Paden also includes an interesting essay on Japanese Blue Note album releases. It ends with the chapter J Jazz Top Tens, a list of the most important jazz music albums from Japan, according to the authors, not just free. In twenty-two “tens” they recall albums selected by themselves, by forum participants on Higgins' blog, as well as the most important titles belonging to particular varieties of this type of music; a separate “ten” has been given to the Three Blind Mice record label.

There is also a CD with ten tracks selected from albums that BBE Records has released so far as part of its “J Jazz Music” series. I have listened to it and I think that it is musically a great item. It's sonically uneven, but these are recordings from different releases, years and studios. However, the CD is still very good, also because jazz recordings from Japan are usually technically perfect (which we won't read about anywhere). The sound is reliable, clean and very dynamic. For me, it lacks the depth of warmth that we get from SACDs prepared in recent years for the Japanese market, but this is not any particular complaint.

▌ Conclusions

The monograph J Jazz Book - Free and Modern Jazz Albums From Japan 1954 - 1988 by TONY HIGGINS and MIKE PEDEN, PUBLISHED BY BARELY BREAKING EVEN MUSIC, is a book that we deserved, if I may say so. There are plenty excellent graphic albums on the market, associated with jazz album covers, with the leading Jazz Covers by Joaquim Paulo (Taschen), but this is the first monograph devoted solely to Japanese albums. It was prepared with love and care by people with passion. It includes interesting essays and is finely made. A bookmark is a nice addition.

Even though it was printed in China, which is a sign of the times (a book about Japanese records in China – twenty years ago this would have been unthinkable!), it looks very nice. I slightly miss the care that the aforementioned Taschen or Thames & Hudson put into their publications. It's about details, but for anyone who has seen a couple of perfectly published items, gluing the last page together with a sheet that is part of the cover gives you information that it is a decent, but not reference way of publishing.

However, it really doesn’t matter, as it is a very necessary book that fills in the gap in our knowledge of jazz music in Japan and brings us information on the world which we know virtually nothing about. Thank you! ●