Harmony above all: Visiting a jazz kissa

At Stereophile, Alex Halberstadt writes about some of the jazz kissas he recently visited in Japan:

A pretty space paneled in light wood, the Eagle serves pizza, spaghetti, desserts, and the usual combination of coffee and alcohol. As in every kissa I visited, the air-moving was accomplished with hefty American-made speakers, in this case a pair of wall-mounted JBL 4344 MKII studio monitors. In a kind of deejay room that's off-limits to customers, I spotted an Accuphase C-280V preamp, a Mark Levinson No.23.5L power amp, a pair of Accuphase DP-67 SACD players, and two Yamaha GT-2000 record players outfitted with Denon 103 moving coil cartridges. The sound was dynamic, clear, and loud.

While you’ve likely visited one of the “listening bars” that are materializing all over the world these days, you may not know that their model is rooted in the Japanese jazz kissas Halberstadt writes about.

Jazz kissas—bar-cafes where jazz records are played on expensive hi-fi equipment and coffee or alcohol is poured for patrons—began to take shape in Japan in the late 1920s. Decades later, interest in these havens surged.

Imported American jazz records were way too expensive for the average Japanese jazz fan in the postwar years. Jazz kissas, with their shelves of LPs, McIntosh amps and towering Altec speakers, provided a place to be immersed in sessions led by Art Blakey, Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk just as the popularity of this music broadened in the region.

There are less jazz kissaten now than ever—at the end of the 1970s, there were a couple hundred in Tokyo and approximately 1,500 total in Japan, and today, less than a couple dozen in the country’s capital have been operating since the 1960s. Halberstadt, a memoirist and widely published journalist, has more on that in Stereophile, and I also recommend the work of photographer-writer Katsumasa Kusunose—he has been exploring jazz kissas for years and documenting them in print and via Instagram.

Back in 2023, in his “Brilliant Corners” column at Stereophile, Halberstadt wrote about the struggle of actually listening in a jazz kissa-influenced New York City “listening bar.” I can confirm his reporting—these spaces open with frequency here, and their patrons are usually more interested in talking than listening. For the latter, there’s always Tokyo.

Image © 2021 Katsumasa Kusunose for In Sheep’s Clothing