Second Floor Underground

Finished up a conference in Shinjuku.  A friend asked if I’d ever visited the “Golden Gai” bar street near by.  He said a colleague had told him about it.  I’ve been in this city 100 times but drew a blank.  “Sure, let’s head over.  We’ll have our friend meet us there.”  He showed me some photos on line and I began to suspect that I knew precisely where it was.  Rickety, touristy but uniquely Japanese and sure, as long as we’re over here, let's hit it. 

The cab let us out on a high street, explaining as best he could what we obvious, he couldn’t drive in to the place we were going.  Soon our friend had rendez vous’d with us and we headed over towards the four-alley strip of small wooden constructions.  One friend found a bar with his namesake and after being turned out of a few standing room only joints we headed up to their steep second floor perch and ordered a round.  Remarkably a conversation with one of the other patrons, made clear that she was in fact the daughter of someone he had studied with in Berkeley, many years ago. 

But the music sucked.  And the perch atop the bar was rather isolated, so we made our way on.  One street and then another and before we found another second floor joint that advertised itself as a jazz bar.  Fortunately one of my pals has impeccable Japanese and before long we were seated there in a corner of the bar, while people before and after us were all turned away. 

The bartender was not a very friendly sort.  But he didn’t need to be.  Someone pointed out as he poured a drink that he only had one arm.  Couldn’t say if that had anything to do with his disposition.  He had on some confrontational free form jazz that was intriguing and I asked to see the disc.  (And in this blisteringly modern age of ubiquitous photographic capacity, I snapped a pic of the CD cover so I know through the fog of that night, precisely who it was:)  “Satoko Fujii Orchestra Nagoya”  Had most assuredly not heard of this combo but now that I throw it in Youtube I see there is plenty to explore.  More on this later.

I suggested it sounded cool and tried to connect with the mixologist:  “Here, have you heard of this?”  I showed him a photo of the Takyua Kuroda album “Rising Son” which had been hitting me hard as a funky, contemporary bop, these past few weeks.  He took a glance and acknowledged cognizance as if I’d showed him an Air Supply album.  Right.  You're looking at me as if I'd just declared I was a Loggins & Messina fan.  Of course you know that guy.  He’s blown up and hence he’s off limits here at the second floor underground.  He gave us a bowl of sauerkraut later, which was gentlemanly.  But we didn’t talk about jazz ever again.