Jozenji Street Jazz Festival

Up until this weekend, my experience of music festivals has been limited to managing to miss Stereophonic and the summer music festival in Sackville and the American Folk Festival in Bangor. The Folk Festival is quite an impressive undertaking for a city of 30,000 people: three days of continuous music in five venues along the waterfront, craft and food markets, crowds of 110,000 people. I like being from Bangor on the Folk Festival weekend. It did not, however, prepare me for a music festival as put on by a city of one million people.

The Jozenji Street Jazz Festival is in its eighteenth year in Sendai and no longer features only, or even mostly, jazz music; we were told the name has remained the same mostly to keep from scaring away the old people. It does centre on Jozenji Street and on Kotodai-Koen, the several-acre park at one of its corners, but also spreads through most of the downtown area. At any one time, there might be ten or twelve bands playing simultaneously, not counting the sundry performers hired by the downtown restaurants, cafes, and shops to try to attract people off the streets. The quantity is rivalled by the diversity: in walking down one block yesterday, I heard and saw four groups that ranged from stool-and-guitar folksy Japanese music to traditional Indonesian dance to garage-band rock. Almost no one stayed put through an entire performance by any one group, and I could certainly see why.

On Saturday, I headed into town with Kristin. We stayed mostly in Kotodai-Koen for the music, and then wandered up and down a few blocks of Jozenji Street to see if we could find the bazaar someone had told us was there. We couldn’t find a bazaar, but we did find an art museum with a jazz troupe playing and a gift shop that sold the most amazing t-shirts. My favourite had a picture of a vacuum cleaner and the corner of the shirt pulled up so that it looked like the vacuum was sucking up the shirt. We took lots of t-shirt pictures, and played with the tops in the toy section (this is where I should admit that we had earlier found a booth selling rather large drafts of beer for 500 yen).

In Kotodai-Koen, we saw one jazz band, who played and sang James Brown apparently without understanding any of the lyrics, but mostly some very good Japanese folk-rock groups. One featured the most genki (an all-purpose Japanese word, most often used to describe the ideal ALT, that means lively, happy, perky, etc) singer I have ever seen. He was bounding all over the stage, trying to get the crowd to sing along, jumping up and down on a milk crate, and just generally using up his breath in pursuits other than singing. His bassist was considerably calmer; he kept taking swigs from a beer in between and occasionally during the songs.

My favourite of the evening was also the last, a very Celtic-inspired group that reminded me quite a bit of some of the Folk Festival groups I’ve heard, also while sitting on the grass after dark, except that they were singing in Japanese. If they hadn’t been, I might have been homesick, but the combination of Celtic and Japanese was just weird enough that I was fine. They rocked out until the ripe old hour of nine, when the festival ended for the day.

On Sunday I went back downtown by myself; I had a couple of appointments and wanted to wander around in between them, with the intent of trying to get an idea of the festival’s extent. I completely failed at this, mostly because I kept getting distracted by a particular band and then realizing I had to run if I was going to make it to the next place I had to be. Sunday seemed to bring out more jazz, which might be because there were more older people around -- businesspeople often work a six-day week, including Saturday, but take a break on Sundays. My favourite of the day featured a female singer who switched from English to Japanese so smoothly that it took me a couple of seconds, every single time, to figure out why I suddenly couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Today is Respect for the Aged Day, a national holiday that makes this a three-day weekend. Some of the ALTs used the opportunity to go travelling, mostly to Tokyo. I am thinking that the one problem with Sendai may be that I will never want to leave, for fear of missing something…