Walkin' the Tokaido

Whenever I'm in Tokyo, I make a point of checking out one or two jazz clubs. As I've intimated previously, my hometown of Christchurch is a bit of a jazz backwater. Tokyo, on the other hand, is a jazz Mecca. It must have one of the highest concentrations of jazz venues (clubs, bars, coffee shops, etc.) of any city in the world. And this interest in jazz isn’t just confined to the older generation. One of the most successful Japanese movies in recent years is Swing Girls, which is about a group of high school girls who form a big band. It even sparked a bit of a big band boom, the effects of which are still visible in the form of a number of venues in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan specializing in this form of jazz.

Not only does Japan have a thriving local jazz community, but it also attracts many great jazz artists from overseas. These artists love to play in Japan, and it's not just the prospect of earning good money that appeals to them. Although things have changed somewhat since the heady days of the sixties when Art Blakey, the first big foreign jazz artist to visit Japan, received the kind of reception usually reserved for rock stars in other countries, such artists still appreciate the respect with which they're treated in Japan. Keith Jarrett, who usually tours Japan at least once a year either for solo concerts or with his trio, is just one of the many overseas jazz artists who've expressed admiration for Japanese jazz audiences.

The history of jazz in Japan is something I haven’t really looked into in any detail. Several books have been written in English on the subject, and I intend reading a couple of them as soon as the New Zealand dollar recovers so that I can order them from Amazon without it costing me an arm and a leg.

This time I'll only have a couple of nights in Tokyo at the end of my walk, so I may not have the time or energy to see any live shows there. However, I've been doing some research into venues in some of the places I'll be stopping at along the Tokaido, and some of them look quite promising. I've found a couple of places in the cities where I have rest days scheduled (Nagoya and Shizuoka), for example. But I'm also looking forward to sampling what some of the smaller centres have to offer.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since Tokaido training began: 88.9km
Days left until departure: 59