Nujabes - The Kami of Jazz-Rap

It must have looked like 1980s Detroit, that small district of Minato-ku (a municipality of Tokyo) which thirty years ago was in the midst of rapid industrial development. The Japanese capital was by then saturated with buildings, and the giants of industry (both tech and cultural) needed new spaces for their glass towers: Honda, Mitsubishi, TV Tokyo, but also Pokémon Company, Yahoo! Japan, Apple — in less than a decade they erected their temples in a district that had once been peripheral, far from the metropolitan chaos. It was precisely in the Nishi-Azabu neighborhood, between a Buddhist temple, a handful of office buildings and a cluster of night-clubs known for decent jazz performances, that a small enfant prodige of Japanese hip-hop grew up: Seba Jun; reverse the letters, and you get Nujabes.

Once upon a time there was a record store…

Long before nostalgia became a marketing strategy, for Seba the love of the past was the emotional key that guided his whole life. He wasn't some kid in a tracksuit riding a scooter, chasing after schoolgirls in uniform; today we'd call him a nerd, a geek: a teenager who, right in the middle of the explosion of Japan's sugary glam culture, preferred to shut himself indoors with old vinyl records by Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. A steady diet of jazz, world and soul fueled the passion of this chubby, sharp-eyed twenty-year-old. "I started making tracks because I wanted to hear music that sampled the old soul and jazz I liked", he later admitted in an interview, revealing that beatmaking came first, and hip-hop was a consequence — a small discovery made by a young Nujabes tinkering with mixers and vinyl, much like an Afrika Bambaataa of 1980. Seba's very first venture, while still only twenty-one, was the Guinness Records shop, a record store of his own: a cramped urban cave turned into a gallery of rarities he had collected up to that point (today visible only in a handful of old video clips). His business soon proved a success. The place became a meeting point for music fans of every stripe, although most customers were after just one genre that everyone in late-1990s Japan was talking about: hip-hop. The shop's competitive prices and Nujabes's increasingly praised skill at putting together mixtapes quickly made him a cult figure of the Tokyo underground.

That said, before diving deeper into Nujabes's career, it's worth noting that hip-hop first arrived in Japan primarily as an aesthetic trend (much as rock had before it), spreading in the second half of the 1980s thanks to the streetwear imported by Hiroshi Fujiwara's brand and the famous documentary "Wild Style". The music came later, nearly a decade after this first wave driven by fashion. The reason seems fairly obvious: the Japanese language didn't lend itself easily to flow. For simplicity's sake, English-language rap won out (allowing for some bilingual exceptions); a choice that ended up importing into the newborn movement strong influences from late-80s East Coast hip-hop. The genre's pioneers in Japan's big cities were, at first, carbon-copy imitations of Public Enemy and Beastie Boys, albeit with a few exceptions. Only in the 2000s did an already well-known collective like King Giddra start drawing on A Tribe Called Quest, folding some jazz-rap influence into their sound; thematically, things are a different story, as lyrics remained locked throughout the Nineties into old-school hedonism. Nujabes's den, by contrast, stayed well clear of this crowd of imitators; rather than copy, he preferred to blend overseas influences, experiment, and ultimately innovate.

In 1998 came the turning point in Seba's life: he founded Hyde Out Productions. The idea was a classic one: a small label to promote friends, colleagues and street talent from the hip-hop scene, as well as a workspace where he could make mixes full-time. The outcome, however, was anything but predictable. The producer's sharp eye reached all the way to the States, where he discovered and distributed Substantial's debut "To This Union A Sun Was Born" and forged a lasting partnership with Jon Marshall, aka Fat Jon. Nujabes was no longer just an unknown name overseas — he was also gaining recognition through the tracks he himself produced in collaboration with his artists. His first known successes (still within a fairly narrow niche) were "Ain't No Mystery" with L Universe and "People Don't Stray" with Funky DL; both hip-hop tracks that sound a bit dated for 1999, yet carried by a beat already distinctive of the producer, complete with piano loops, sax and vinyl crackle, all topped off with generous scratching.

Blessing the jazz

Between productions, distribution deals and collaborations, 2003 was the year of Metaphorical Music, the first studio album credited to Nujabes from start to finish. The sound of Q-Tip and co. (that of "The Low End Theory" above all) had been fully absorbed by the Japanese DJ; the rap side of the record is driven with real energy by Seba's longtime friends, while the beatmaking tap-dances along the thin line separating jazz from instrumental hip-hop. The album opens with "Blessing It": a virtuosic tangle of samples, including two extracts from Pharoah Sanders's "Save Our Children", over which Substantial and Pase Rock trade quickfire verses about rap as if it were an article of faith. The initial gospel mood is broken by the double bass of "Horn In The Middle", which turns Miles Davis's "Joshua" into a techno stride à la Propellerheads. With "Lady Brown" and "Highs 2 Lows" Nujabes's spirit soars into more world-leaning celestial spheres, sampling Luiz Bonfà alongside the rapping of Cise Starr (another outsider of canonical hip-hop, who also boasts a collaboration with Four Tet). "Kumomi" is a one-minute instrumental portrait blending jazzy sounds with a piano carrying an Eastern inflection: it feels like a scene out of Kawabata's "The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa", capturing how a Japanese listener in the 1930s might have perceived Black American music.
"Beats Laments The World" is in all likelihood Nujabes's masterpiece; a small instrumental Mona Lisa painted with samples of Kip Hanrahan, the very emblem of the Tokyo producer's atmospheric beatmaking style. Next, on the same level, comes the thoroughly Eastern drama of "Letter From Yokosuka": a kabuki scene acted out by horns and piano. And while Substantial and Shing02 perform verbal acrobatics to keep up with the absurd tempo shifts of "Think Different" and "F.I.L.O." (the latter built on a Toquinho acoustic guitar riff, interrupted by schizophrenic bursts of scratching), "Next View" edges toward experimentalism with a trip-hop sound (in the vein of early DJ Shadow) steeped in noir tones. A lethal trio of tracks closes things out, a perfect antidote to any stress. "Summer Gypsy", "The Final View" and "Peaceland" sketch the white beaches of Okinawa with long, outstretched sax notes over chill rhythms.

There were times when we'd talk for hours about a song before actually recording it
("Substantial")

A DJ in the age of the samurai

In less than a year, the Japanese producer's solo debut reached the ears of a kindred spirit: Shinichiro Watanabe, director and producer of anime (Japanese animated works) acclaimed by critics for his ability to craft stories straddling Western and Eastern imagery. Watanabe's first celebrated work is known as "Cowboy Bebop": a series with western and noir elements underpinned by a jazz and blues soundtrack, surprisingly set in a sci-fi future full of spaceships, alien races and laser guns. The mix proved a winning, well-orchestrated formula from the director, who was himself gripped by a nostalgic feeling for a grayscale, post-New Deal America; composer Yoko Kanno's fusion soundtrack was a hit.
The formula needed replicating, but this time Watanabe chose Nujabes. In 2004 the director came up with a new self-contained anime made in an extremely refined style: "Samurai Champloo". The simple, transcultural plot revolved around two swordsmen with troubled pasts escorting a young woman across Edo-period Japan in search of a mysterious "samurai who smells of sunflowers" (an ironic paradox, given that the flower is typically Western). The Land of the Rising Sun depicted in "Samurai Champloo", however, is a loose historical interpretation, blending real characters and events from the Edo period, such as Miyamoto Musashi or the Shimabara Rebellion, with all sorts of stylistic revisions winking at hip-hop culture, like ukiyo-e artists doing graffiti and idlers dabbling in beatboxing. The imaginary universe devised by Watanabe became fertile ground for the instrumental hip-hop of Seba and his fellow producers. The series' soundtrack was released across four albums: "Masta" and "Playlists", credited to Dj Tsutchie, with a markedly rap-oriented feel; "Departure" and "Impression", made by Nujabes and Fat Jon, with a more ambient, chill tone.

Departure is certainly a cut above the other albums in the soundtrack. The opening track alone, which doubles as the anime's opening theme, shows a further evolution in Nujabes's style: "Battlecry" is a small postmodern symphony, in which Shing02's near-spoken flow narrates samurai ethics in contemporary slang over remixed free-jazz digressions. The rest of the album consists of short instrumental pieces (almost always under four minutes), which do nothing but unleash Seba's creativity, no longer tied down to whichever rapper happens to be on hand. The warm guitar notes of Laurindo Almeida form the backbone of "Aruarian Dance"; Ahmad Jamal's piano is sped up over saloon-style rhythms in "Kajaku"; "1st Samurai" is jazz with an underwater, muffled sound. The album's closing stretch shows a Nujabes already off the rails of hip-hop, running instead through more ambient strains of electronic music. Examples include the Bristol trip hop of "624 part.1 & 2" and "Chambers", which even welcomes distorted echoes of early Autechre.

Some days, some nights
Some live, some die
In the way of the samurai”
(“Battlecry”)

The follow-up to "Departure" has a more varied cast of contributors. Impression is essentially made up of three sections: the first by the duo Force Of Nature, halfway between old school rap and techno-dance passages, the second by Nujabes, expanding on the atmospheres of the previous album, and the third by Fat Jon, leaning towards more techno-ambient territory.
Although there's a slight inconsistency in tone among the three artists, the effort to adapt to one another is clear, giving rise to the percussion-and-upright-bass gallops of Force Of Nature's "Nightshift" and "The Million Way Of Drum" (in line with the instruments Nujabes usually samples), the fusion mini-suite "World Without Words", with heavy use of keyboards, and the flute-accompanied instrumental hip-hop that Fat Jon puts together on "Right Out". Closing things out is the r&b of Minmi (a well-known Japanese female voice), again accompanied by our Seba, sealing an album with an old-fashioned flavour but a modern beat.

A spirit as light as a feather

The eclectic experience afforded by the "Samurai Champloo" soundtrack became, for Nujabes, the laboratory in which to test the ingredients for his new studio work: Modal Soul. Behind the title lies a play on the concept of modal music, which ends up placing the soul as the tonal centre of the thousand variations of human feeling, through which Seba acts as a Charon for just over an hour of album. This time, the DJ sets off with greater conviction in his own vision than on "Metaphorical Music"; now he knows he can handle a sound system built exclusively on jazz and soul samples, stripping away every frill, where the rapping is carefully chosen and no line is ever left to chance.
The spirituality inherent in Nujabes's sonic poetics marries the rhymes of the MCs involved in the project (six of them this time around). "Feather", the opening of "Modal Soul", is paved by Yusef Lateef's grand piano, whose sample cradles Cise Starr's flow (once again alongside Seba). The verse is deep, and ends up resembling a stream of haiku as the refrain kicks in: "Drifting away like a feather in air/ Letting my words take me away from the hurt and despair"; while in a single verse Starr even manages to play with Steinbeck and Keyes: “The rules of paradise are never nice/ The best laid plans of Mice and Men are never right/ I’m just a Vagabond with Flowers for Algernon”.
Like "Feather", "Luv(sic) Part 3" paints a soft, anachronistic fresco, where a scratched Nana Caymmi introduces Shing02's reflective rap. The MC proves a match for his producer, structuring the lyrics like a room of mirrors, where the second verse reflects the first and the third distorts the previous two. Slightly less striking, on the other hand, are the rap/gospel of "The Sign" with Pase Rock and the more conventional hip-hop of "Eclipse" (whose lyrics are nonetheless over the top). Nujabes's strong suits remain his hybrids of downtempo and jazz: "Ordinary Joe" features Terry Callier himself (in his most soulful register); "Reflection Eternal" turns a passage by composer Noriko Kose into moonlit jazz; "World's End Rhapsody" also draws on 70's funk.
The samples on the second half of the record reveal a Nujabes fully at ease with the entire cosmos of Black music, no longer limiting himself to jazz classics, but intent on forging his own brand of cool jazz by mixing the building blocks of soul, r&b and world music without hesitation. The result is the album's closing signature: "Horizon", an instrumental suite of piano, beats, synths and horns.

Despite success at home and abroad, Nujabes kept treating his own original music as a hobby. He saw himself as an all-round producer, and his primary interest remained Hyde Out Productions. Indeed, the years following "Modal Soul" were devoted to the label's own talents: Emancipator's debut, composer Uyama Hiroto's first solo album, as well as several compilations made in collaboration with the label's artists. Seba's reserved, introspective nature led him to an almost ascetic life, spent mainly between his coastal home in the village of Kamakura (a town nearly a hundred kilometres from the capital) and the recording studio.
One night, however, the metropolis he fled every day claimed him for good. In 2010, late one February evening, Nujabes lost his life in a car accident on the Shuto Expressway (the motorway network connecting the greater Tokyo area); he had just turned 36. The shock was immense, and countless friends and colleagues around the world did everything they could to pay tribute to him.

An illegitimate testament

Beyond the two tribute compilations released a year after his death, the true conclusion of Nujabes's body of work is considered to be Spiritual State, his third studio album, made up of all the unreleased material the producer had left unfinished or on hold. The posthumous album, released in 2011, is unfortunately only a shadow of its predecessors, perhaps for lack of its original author's critical eye, or because of the label's urge to craft an ending to a story cut short too soon. The previously unreleased collaborations with his friend Uyama Hiroto stand out for the jazz precision that only two experts could bring: "Spiritual State", "Gone Are The Days" and "Island" — while sketching landscapes somewhere between breakbeat and chillout — carry a melancholy as deep as the tales of the biwa hōshi (lute-playing bards of Japanese tradition). The sporadic rap moments stay muted, except for the apocalyptic sound of "Sky Tumbling" with Cise Starr, where bursts of piano and sax alternate with the American rapper's intermittent flow, complete with a trip-hop coda.
Among the Nujabes solo tracks, on the other hand, "Far Fowls" feels like a very welcome outlier: a piece in which strings and flute are gradually layered over the beatmaking and an acoustic-guitar sample, bringing out that touch of orientalism that Seba always avoided foregrounding in his productions.

One day, Nujabes emailed me about wanting to collaborate for a 12″ single. I had no idea who he was or where he came from, I was actually surprised to find out that he was a Japanese guy named Jun Seba, diminutive and shy. When we met up in Tokyo, we listen to beats in his minivan. I was impressed by his simple yet soulful layering of samples and chopped drums”.
(Shing02)

Five years after the tragic accident, Shing02 would release Luv(sic) Hexalogy, a hypothetical collection of the six parts of the Luv(sic) project that Seba and the rapper had been working on before 2010. Other hands were forced to work on the instrumental lines sketched out by Nujabes in order to complete the piece; and yet, running quickly through the jazz-rap suite, what strikes the ear is a sonic journey carried by Shing02's verses, guiding the listener from the lo-fi sampled-jazz backdrop of "Part 1" all the way to the ambient, synthetic expanse of "Grand Finale".
Of the thousand things one could say to close this monograph, which sadly will never continue, one could speak of Nujabes's influence on contemporary electronic music, on hip-hop, on downtempo and on trip-hop, but the most fitting image comes from a visual oxymoron: Nujabes forever pictured bent over the console, eyes fixed on the turntables, alongside the words with which Shing02 marked his passing: "Nujabes has touched so many people around the world".
Sometimes you don't even need to look up to make yourself heard.

Through his soulful music, Nujabes has touched so many people around the world, even beyond his dreams.
(Shing02)

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