Shuya Okino
The club jazz impresario leaves his mark with his solo debut and a summit at Ageha

Photo by Dan Grunebaum

What, exactly, is “club jazz”? “People get confused,” explained DJ/producer/club owner Shuya Okino over tea in Shibuya recently. “Some people think club jazz is jazz, while the older generation complains it’s not jazz, so I had to make a definition. Club jazz means dance music influenced by jazz music. It’s not 100 percent jazz, but we love and are influenced by jazz.”
Okino, who along with his brother Yoshi is part of noted DJ collective Kyoto Jazz Massive, is so passionate about the genre that he’s launched an event, Tokyo Crossover/Jazz Festival, dedicated to the scene, and is even writing a book about it. Okino came to club jazz, often called acid jazz, through an encounter with one of the form’s seminal figures, English DJ Gilles Peterson.

“I went to London when I was 20 years old and went to a party run by Gilles,” he recalls. “The music was completely to my taste, so I decided at Heathrow Airport to become a DJ.” The problem was that in Kyoto at the time, there were no proper clubs, only DJs spinning cheesy J-pop. So Okino and his brother started a night devoted to jazz, rare groove, Brazilian and Latin music at a new club he ended up managing.

The name Kyoto Jazz Massive, under which Okino now DJs worldwide also came thanks to Peterson. “When Gilles came to Kyoto with Galliano, I asked him for his signature. He gave me a small booklet and signed it not to Shuya, but to the ‘Kyoto Jazz Massive.’ I asked if we could use that for our name.”

As Okino began to manage fast-emerging early ’90s acts like Mondo Grosso and Monday Michiru, his work took him to Tokyo more and more. Eventually he decided to move, but only if he could have a Tokyo home for his club events. “I needed a place like I had in Kyoto, so I opened Room with my friends. It was quite difficult. I was promoting and running the club and playing every weekend as Kyoto Jazz Massive.”

With a decade and a half under its belt, the cozy Room in a basement on the Sakuragaoka side of Shibuya station now ranks high in the annals of Tokyo’s clubland. But things haven’t always gone smoothly. “As the club scene got bigger, each genre became smaller because the whole scene has become specialized,” Okino observes. “Even within the club jazz scene there is broken beats, jazzy house, straight jazz—so many different kinds of club jazz and so many jazz DJs.”
Okino says his business peaked a decade ago and then went into decline, but has lately been on the upswing. “Recently because I’ve been producing many artists associated with the Room—Monday Michiru, Mondo Grosso, Hajime Yoshizawa—these artists bring new customers. I released 25 CDs this year, [which sold] a total of 100,000 copies, so the Room is busier than ever.

“Not only Japanese but foreigners come to my club, which has won a name for itself because it’s owned by Kyoto Jazz Massive. It’s difficult to find a weekly party with well-known Japanese DJs like Ken Ishii or DJ Krush. I’m kind of an international DJ, so tourists check the web and come to my weekend residency.”

Okino has toured over 100 cities worldwide, and doesn’t have kind words for Tokyo’s club scene. “Tokyo is a stylish place but the attitude at clubs is not friendly,” he says. “In five years I’ve been to 30 countries, and checked out so many clubs. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes not, but I know many nice clubs, and I want to make my own club friendly.”

As Okino approaches 40, he also wants to leave his mark in the form of an album with his name on it. “I wanted to sum up my musical career until now,” he states in typically forthright manner. “Also, DJs mostly don’t play instruments or write songs. I was feeling guilty. I felt I had to compose my own melodies.”

Not a trained musician, Okino decided to hum the melodies he was hearing in his head (“I could release a humming album,” he jokes), and then have his KJM programmer compose a series of demo tracks. “I sent emails to 20 artists asking them to join my solo album. Some I had met before, some I had never met, but they’re all my favorite artists right now.”

Ranging from classic, uplifting acid jazz to broken beats and future-funk, United Legends, compiled entirely via the internet, includes tracks by a slew of distinguished producers and musicians, including Dego of UK breakbeat leaders 4Hero fame and powerful singer Navasha Daya of Baltimore soul-jazz group Fertile Ground. It’s the perfect soundtrack for stylish urban warriors, and a good indication of why trendy department store Parco chose Okino to produce the music for its TV commercial campaign.

Another of Okino’s ambitious projects is the Tokyo Crossover/Jazz Festival, an event he launched five years ago that’s morphed into Japan’s largest club jazz gathering. “Five years ago I was invited to Croatia for its Future Jazz Festival,” he recounts. “It was a two-day festival with 5,000 people. I was shocked because ten years ago Yugoslavia had a war, but now they have a festival of my kind of music. I was thinking that there are so many different music festivals in Japan, but not our kind.”

In addition to a live KJM set featuring UK singers Vanessa Freeman and Tasita D’Mour, next weekend’s sprawling party at Ageha will include live performances by Swedish club jazz unit Koop and American R&B singer Frank McComb, as well as appearances by the cream of the Japanese crop, like recent, highly rated entrants to the scene Sleep Walker and Cro-Magnon.

Tokyo Crossover/Jazz Festival 2006@Ageha, Dec 8. See club listings for details. United Legends is available on Geneon Entertainment.

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