Jazz Hands: “Kids on the Slope,” Jazz, and Me

I really did kinda look like this growing up.

I: One Note Samba

I envied them, the kids in the high school jazz band. I was the misfit pianist in the ninth grade orchestra, a player that didn’t belong: unless it’s a piano concerto, there’s not supposed to be a pianist. They accommodated me anyway, letting my jangling chords ring in the background as the violins, cellos, and brass slid and swooped into the 1812 Overture, the Indiana Jones theme.

Where else was I supposed to go, though? I’d been taking classical music piano lessons since the age of five. I knew my scales, arpeggios, and cadences, and I knew how to read music from a sheet. I tried, and sometimes failed, to follow the metronome in the quest to not only play all the notes correctly but keep them on the beat. “You’re always too fast,” my piano teacher, and my mother, would often complain. I never learned how to play from anything that didn’t have both treble and bass clefs and all the notes written out to tell me exactly where to go. The orchestra was the only place for people with my kind of training, but still, I didn’t quite belong there.

But the pianist belonged in the jazz band. Heck, sometimes he even had a solo. Other times, he filled the rhythm with the bassist and the drummer, diminished and ninth and suspended chords placed just right on and between beats. Fills would slink in from time to time. The reeds and the horns would shout and the sax would croon, but the piano was cool. Understated. Sophisticated.

So sometime in the summer after my freshman year in high school, I asked my piano teacher: teach me to play jazz, so I can audition for the jazz band. Luckily, he knew both jazz and classical, so he started me on a new book, and told me to beef up my scales and cadences. “You’re going to need it.” It’s a different way of thinking, a new world.

Music can be found everywhere.

II: It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)

Being early trained in classical piano or violin, of course, has become part of the Asian stereotype. An entire book was just published by a Chinese-American “Tiger Mother” who proudly forced, belittled, and punished her daughters to become musical prodigies. It’s always classical music, never any other kind; the famous Suzuki method is founded upon repetition after repetition of famous pieces by famous composers. The Tiger Mom denied her daughter bathroom breaks until she played a piece exactly right.

What jazz means is something else entirely. It is not as respectable. It is not as suitable, perhaps, on some cultural level. “It’s black music,” my mother once said, with the implication that it wasn’t for anyone else. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the new anime Kids on the Slope is set, jazz had yet to acquire the upscale/yuppie association that it carries today. There was still the stench of urbanness, of drug addiction (reading a list of famous jazz musicians is like reading a list of junkies), of avant-garde beatniks and rebels and dive bars and underground clubs.

Kids on the Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon) captures this divide perhaps too obviously: Kaoru is the bespectacled honor student who plays classical piano. He encounters Sentaro, the roof-dwelling, free-spirited, delinquent jazz drummer. There is a reliance on shorthand and stereotype here that hopefully will become more complex later, which the careful pacing of the show seems to promise. But for now, the shape of the story is a familiar one: uptight kid learns to relax and live a little through the power of rebellious music, while perhaps falling in love at the same time. Not that great stories can’t be made from stock elements, but it’s not a particularly unique one.

The perceived rigidity of classical training is taken to such an extreme, in fact, that it manifests itself as nausea-inducing social anxiety whenever Kaoru encounters unfamiliar situations. He is the player confronted only with a lead sheet and not a full bevy of treble and bass notes, of exact instructions. Sentaro, on the other hand, finds rhythm whether he’s behind a drum kit or whether he’s just tapping out a rhythm with twigs on a handrail. The music is in his head, not on a page. And when Kaoru tries to correctly play the chords and notes of “Moanin,” Sentaro insists there’s more to the song than just the notes. He practically quotes Duke Ellington: “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” The musical session then abruptly ends, but not before an intrigued Kaoru decides to embark on a new journey, the way all music is really taught: by listening to the masters (on record or live) and by playing along with someone else.

He could be smoking a joint as far as a lot of Asian parents go.

III: Kind of Blue

This is too broad, of course. The classical composers themselves were masters of improvisation, and the best classical orchestras and players interpret the pieces with as much feeling and passion as the great jazz soloists over a lead sheet.

But as I began to learn jazz, I saw just how different not only the playing style, but the mentality, was compared to classical music. One only gets to be individualistic in classical music after one has learned to play all the notes correctly, from memory, and with the exact tempo as written. In jazz, as in all things genuinely American, individual expression is the whole point. Right away, you are presented not with a full bevy of treble and bass notes keeping the hands busy with all the notes to follow. You get a lead sheet with a melody line and chords on top of the single staff. The melody line is played through only twice: at the beginning, and the end. In between the soloists surge forth into the unknown, using the chord sequence as a foundation for their own riffs and phrases. You’re on your own.

I couldn’t handle this. As I struggled through my audition piece, the ballad “Autumn Leaves,” I would play the melody line with my right hand and try to play the chords with my left. The metronome ticked. I got the notes right, but the chords seemed plodding, thudding even. I was playing whole three note chords, with no major sevenths, suspensions, or blue notes: the things that actually made things “jazzy.” And I had no swing. I would try to add some flourish here or there, but then everything went off completely. There was so little guidance. These pieces—standards, as they’re called—were supposed to already be familiar, so familiar that you could just take the melody line as a departure point. But I was still trying to learn the melody.

Bit by bit, I improved. It took hours of listening and playing, sometimes with eyes closed. I tried to hear the tap of the cymbals, the slow thrum of the bass player in the silence. I tried to emulate the effortless cool and sophistication of the chords I heard the pianist play in the recordings, but always came up short.

Still, when I played it in front of the band director, I somehow made it in. I started playing in the jazz band in my junior year of high school, 1997.

IV: Giant Steps

There was already a pianist in the jazz band, Chappell. He wore round spectacles and his shaggy, long blond hair flew all around his head when he tore up and down the piano. He was also really into progressive rock, the only other person I knew who knew about the bands I adored at the time: Yes, King Crimson, Genesis.

I was in awe of Chappell from nearly the beginning, in awe of his ability to play classical music just as well as he could play jazz just as well as he could compose his own pieces for woodwinds. The band director told him to mentor and train me in how to become a better jazz pianist, and essentially to be his understudy whenever he wasn’t available for concerts and other band performances.

Kids on the Slope gets this right: the way popular music, as opposed to something like classical music, is really taught and passed down is from person to person. It’s not just the mentoring that listening to good records has, though that’s essential: I still couldn’t play “Autumn Leaves” that well even after I heard the song dozens of times. Someone usually has to show you the ropes. Chappell would tell me: ok, here’s some different scale modes that sound good in this context. See how adding a seventh here or a lowered fifth makes it sound jazzy? Try learning a pentatonic (blues) scale and add a blue note here and there to the solo. Little by little, I began to hear it enough that I could play it, at least sometimes. Chord sequences, not just individual chords, came alive. The right kind of repetition became riffs.

I was learning to not just hear, but to speak jazz.

My guess is that this is the role Sentaro is going to play in Kaoru’s life. He’s going to get him to swing, to put all that dull exercises we all learned as classical pianists to use by showing how they free you, not constrict you. He will learn that all that music theory actually has a purpose, and once it’s not just something to parrot back on a test but internalized, then the solos will come, and they will sound great. He will learn to follow and weave himself in between the drumbeat.

All musical training is ultimately about that, even classical: all artistic training really. You learn the rules so you can know when to bend and break them as a master. For masters there is no such thing as a mistake: it just rolls into the whole and can even be endearing. That’s ultimately the problem with the way music is sometimes taught: the whole point sometimes seems to be trying to avoid mistakes. Be just a little off-rhythm or off note, and it’ll sound obvious. Rote mastery of classical music is suited for those who desire correctness in all things, which is perhaps why it appeals to certain kinds of parents. But that’s not art, that’s mimicry.

Kids on the Slope, then, promises to be a show that talks about how craft can become soul. Perhaps Kaoru will teach Sentaro that precision is important too: even in jazz, you can play off-rhythm or off-key in ways that sound less than pleasant. But for a lot of us who were raised by “Tiger Parents” and for whom our greatest fear was messing up a note during the recital, it’s a welcome reminder that music, art, is ultimately about freedom and pure expression, the kind that even words can’t say. It was that for Mozart (the movie Amadeus portrays this beautifully), for an increasingly deaf Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony. So it can be for even the humblest player who submits not so much to rules and notes, but to the spirit behind them.

It's close enough.

V: Moanin’

How funny that the first episode is called “Moanin'”. “Moanin'” is also the one song where I have a recording of myself playing jazz in high school.

We were at the 1998 jazz invitational hosted by our local university. Our set was six songs long. I played the first song, “Manteca,” and played and soloed on “Moanin'”; the rest were handled by the far superior Chappell. The credits aren’t marked on the CD, but I can tell when it’s me: when I play, it’s always a little bit off rhythm.

The version of “Moanin'” we played isn’t the Art Blakey one that is featured in the anime; it’s a totally different piece by Charlie Mingus. It’s a messy piece by design, made messier by the slightly off-key way high school musicians play, a jumble of sounds that are barely held together by the rhythm section. Professional, it is not.

When it was time for me to solo, I waited for the sax player to finish, closed my eyes, and took off. This is the result: the whole song (solo begins at 3:18).

[display_podcast]

It felt a whole lot better playing it than it sounded in retrospect: frankly, it’s pretty bad, off-rhythm and sometimes obviously off-note. I was far from a master then, and I’m still not.

But when we finished, I heard the applause and the cheers. The band director said my name. I stood up and took a bow, and then let Chappell take over for the rest of the set. I’d said my piece.

Author: gendomike

Michael lives in the Los Angeles area, and has been into anime since he saw Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1999. Some of his favorite shows include Full Metal Alchemist, Honey and Clover, and Welcome to the NHK!. Since 2003 he has gone to at least one anime convention every year. A public radio junkie, which naturally led to podcasting, he now holds a seminary degree and is looking to become Dr. Rev. Otaku Bible Man any day now. Michael can be reached at mike.huang@animediet.net. You can also find his Twitter account at @gendomike.

12 thoughts on “Jazz Hands: “Kids on the Slope,” Jazz, and Me

  1. I love your version of the song that you included here.

    The thing about jazz and “real” music, is that if it’s too professional, it loses a bit of soul. So the off-key bits and varied rhythms turn it into something lifelike and present. When listening to this MP3, I feel like I can see each member of the band playing their parts, experiencing the music personally and feeding off of each other to build toward a unique whole…

    Of course, maybe that’s just the latent musician in me, that has been sleeping since high school band. I played the French Horn, which at a very small school, meant I was my own section and often had no instruments playing the same parts I was. Creating music is something immensely personal then, to me. I regret that I have lost the ability to do so as I never went back to music after high school. French Horn is not an instrument you can really continue with on your own, and I never learned piano well enough to enjoy it…

    Thank you for sharing your experiences and music. It has brought a bit of joy to a drab day.

    1. Thanks Alvin. Glad I could brighten your day…and that you found joy even in such rank amateurism 🙂 We band nerds gotta stick together!

      I still play piano/keyboards for church, though I don’t really play jazz anymore. However church music is still read from lead sheets and I still solo on occasion—and I’m one of the few people who will dare add a blue note here and there in church music 🙂 The things I learned from playing jazz still carry over to this day!

  2. Fantastic post, Mike! So glad to see how you implemented your own experiences to good contrast with the series’ opener. And while I definitely have my own thoughts to share on the premiere episode, I have to offer a slight response to your feelings that the characters are being painted too broadly. This is in many ways the type of drama work that is almost certainly about the mindsets behind Japan’s cultural schism post WWII, and in that sense, the broadness with which Kaoru and Shige are portrayed is perfectly justifiable. In lieu of the many works that have appeared in the anime television sphere, very few have been directed toward an older subset in hopes of reaching a wider audience with the notion that the changes ahead require a breaking of both traditions and rote programming.

    By utilizing the world created by Yuki Kodama, we are being given a peek into this long-standing debate, which I’m almost certain is going to share the impression that one side won out in an industry sense, while the other remained something of a socially outlaw caste.

    Having grown up with music as a keyboardist, and eventually being exposed to more experimental approaches, the philosophy of rigidity has always remained something of a phantom, a trap which can ensnare even the most open-minded expert. And in a story like this, it’s perhaps more a treatise on how both schools can in fact enrich each other. And considering our show’s musical composer; this is something that has remained a constant in her career (perhaps even to the concern of many of her contemporaries), so this is an ideal means to which the children of generations past can see into what great changes today & tomorrow may have in store for us all.

    After all, the guidelines are merely a doorway to new and unexpected paths.

    Again, great post!

    1. Ah, interesting—basically Shige and Kaoru are representative types of two kinds of social trends in Japan at the time. I guess that makes sense, and in a way it’s a battle that still continues. One can even see this sort of thing in the way “honor student” Anno approached Evangelion vs his more “delinquent” partner Yoshiyuki Sadamoto in his manga retelling of the story.

      And you are absolutely right. Any kind of music, no matter how freewheeling in its origin, can become rigid. Arguably even traditional jazz has fallen into this trap, becoming specialist music for specialist upscale audiences. The experimentation of jazz in the 1950s to the 1960s—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, just to name the famous ones—is what’s being celebrated in this anime and is still regarded as a golden age of sorts.

      Thanks for the compliments!

  3. Cool! It’s amazing you still kept that recording of your middle school jazz band! Hehe, blue notes, 9th, 13th. And Kanno Yoko employs a lot of 11th in her songs. But that makes hard to play acoustic guitar with open chords since it modulates too much. Her music is guitarist unfriendly.

    So, jazz was a way to rebel against your Tiger parents? Yeah, Asians are notorious for strict parenting, similar to Jewish parents. Classical piano or violin is a must, and violin is a cultural identity of diaspora. Though most Asian parents are not elite, they try to act and live like it, which is a pathetic trait of the Japanese middle class as well. And always poor kids are the one victimized by that delusion.

    I know a few jazz musicians and most of them were classically trained, but one day they went to protest the rigidness of it. That’s how they went to jazz. And I know some of them were in Jazu-ken (jazz-kenkyuu-bu, jazz research club) in their college years, just like today’s genshi-ken (modern visual art research club), which was very active during the 60’s, the peak of student activism. Murakami Haruki’s “Norwegian wood” is exactly around this time. These politically and philosophically active students read Sartre and Marx and so on, and went to jazz-kissa, or jazz cafe, debating Japanese-American alliance treaty. Yes, during this time, Philopon (“meth” in Japanese slang) was the drug of Japanese jazz-musicians like LSD to psychedelic rock artists. So, it’s not surprising that Sentarou was taking meth. Today, people watch anime, read manga, play video games, and go to maid-kissa with opium called “moe.” In turn, jazz has now become classy, a music for people who are high on intellectualism.

    But irony is that because they were classically trained, now they are able to play jazz. They know the rules, so they can break the rules. Without Apollonian, there wouldn’t be Dionysian. Yes, like Kaoru and Sentarou. Miles’ Autumn Leaves solo is so awesome. It’s intentionally off, and that’s what is great about it! I’m not classically trained, a complete amateur, so I don’t know the exact borderline of chaos and order. So, unintentionally, I’m always off, out of tune, or involuntary Desafinado.

    Sentarou and Kaoru, yankee and yuutousei (honor student). DQN and otaku in today’s sense. Indeed, nikushokukei and soshokukei! Totally different individuals can get together because of music. Yes, jazz as bridge! Shimotsuma monogatari is also awesome. Sukeban (female yankee) and Gosuloli (gothic lolita) become friends. And Arashi No Yoruni, a male wolf and a female goat become friends. Carnivore and herbivore!

    I should add that One Note samba, or Samba De Uma Nota So, is rather a bossa nova piece than a jazz number. Bossa nova’s core is batida rhythm, very Brazilian, and it doesn’t swing. But it’s in RealBook, so probably it’s a jazz number. I don’t feel like it’s jazz though.

    So, do you play One Note Samba? If so, we can definitely jam. I really love that piece!

    1. That is so much rich information there, MLM. First off I think you are totally right in the way a lot of Asian parents try to basically be bourgeoisie. One has to admit that the strategy has paid off in some ways, but it isn’t always great for the happiness of the kids. While I wouldn’t say I “rebelled” so much with jazz, I will say that if I hadn’t started learning jazz, I probably would have quit piano altogether. Jazz was what rekindled my love for playing music and kept it alive. I wouldn’t be playing today if it hadn’t given me a new way of understanding music.

      So meth was the drug of choice for Japanese jazz musicians, huh. Heroin and cocaine were it for the ones here in the US. It’s funny but jazz has evolved to become, in some ways, the second classical music. Rap/hip hop has taken the cultural place that jazz, and then rock music, used to occupy—where a mix of innovation and danger makes the music vital. Few of the original mid-century greats, let alone the early jazz maestros, were formally trained in classical music, but now it’s pretty much a prerequisite to play in professional jazz settings. In fact, music theory is more important in jazz than in other music. You need to know the different scale modes and have your circle of fifths down cold in a way I never had to when I was playing classical. It’s outstanding preparation, really. I don’t regret my classical training one bit, in fact I might force my kids to do it!

      I never learned “One Note Samba.” It was actually the first song that the university band played after we had left the stage in the 1998 invitational, though (so I have a recording of it). Now if only I could get my Real Book back from Maryland, we could totally start jamming…man it’s been so long. BTW, the fact that you know about the Real Book proves to me that you know what you’re talking about. Amirite, fellow jazz freaks?

      1. I see. So, jazz was the one rekindled your love for music. That’s great!

        So, despite its chaoticness, jazz is more theory driven. Now that makes sense why jazz appeals to sophisticated intellectuals. In fact, my jazz musician fellows I know, including you, are highly educated, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and so on, professionals with specialized expertise.

        Yes, jazz has too many modes which I’m not familiar with, but generally as long as you know ionian, aeolian, mixolydian, you can play solo for most of the anime songs. Sometimes locrian when I play a bossa piece. But what amazes me about jazz musicians is that they can write a song on the spot instantly during performance, while it takes me about two weeks to come up with a new melody.

        People I jammed with at a bossa nova session were jazz musicians, and they were reading Real Book, that’s how I know it. Yes, bossa nova was created by jazz musicians like Jobim, hence complicated chords, so naturally bossa tends to attract jazz musicians rather than people with the Beatles background like myself. I got attracted to bossa because of Evangelion ED. Without Eva, I wouldn’t be playing or writing bossa. Or even kept playing guitar at all. So, like jazz rekindled your love for playing music as a pianist, bossa rekindled me to keep playing guitar.

        Hope the show will touch bossa too since it’s the same era!

        Totally, once you got your Real Book back! But One Note Samba should be easy for you since it’s very standard. Meanwhile, we can play some anime songs together and perform like that Christmas party.

  4. It’s Sentaro, not Shige. I wrote this article while I was out somewhere with bad internet and I looked up the name badly. 🙂 Corrections already added. My bad!

  5. AD has writers of musical talent.. ^_^ Lucky being able to sing or play musical instruments. Appreciating music is a great thing.

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