Post a photo from your last gig

[MirrorProfiles]

NewDad at Kentish Town Forum. Big fan of this song

 

[Jazz Padd]

You all have some gigs at quite large venues. I can imagine the energy that must exude!

Here's my modest contribution, with a jazz vocal trio at a small venue I play at monthly.

 

[keef]

This was my last gig. American/Cowpunk originals. That's yours truly on guitar and vocals. Our cover tune was Final Solution by Pere Ubu, post punk. We introduced it and said "Here's our cover tune", that you've never heard along with our original set.

 

[spawnofthesith]

 

[Dez]

You always have sick gig photos.

 

[Jazz Padd]

With a quartet last weekend at a local jazz “kissaten” (Japanese jazz cafe) playing standards for about twenty people.

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Edit: Added details about "jazz kissaten."

For those who are curious, jazz kissaten originated in the early 20th century with the introduction of vinyl records to Japan. They were basically listening spaces for jazz in urban areas. In later years, they also spread to some rural areas. Kissaten had extensive collections of records with a high-end audio system. Customers could sit and listen to jazz while drinking coffee. At one point, there were hundreds of jazz kissaten throughout Japan, peaking in the 1960s and waning by the turn of the century. The book "Tokyo Jazz Joints" documents some of the surviving jazz kissaten, and a fictional jazz kissaten is featured in the Japanese anime "Blue Giant."

Some jazz kissaten later became "live houses," small performance spaces for live music. While kissaten provided records and an audio playback system, live houses provide amps, drums, piano, a PA system and lighting, etc. for small scale performances. Both kissaten and live houses are usually privately owned Mom and Pop type shops with a capacity of perhaps 50 people. They were distinct from bars in that the main reason for going to such a places is to listen to jazz records (and CDs in later years) or to watch or play live music.

The venue that I'm playing at in the photo above was a jazz kissaten in the 1990s, and partly shifted to a live house in more recent years. There are other venues nearby, too, some that also began as kissaten and later repurposed as live houses, and where one can still see the trappings of the old kissaten in them (e.g. large vinyl collections).

Venues that originated as live houses seem to be an outgrowth of the old "music hall" tradition in Japan, which like kissaten date back to the 1920s. There are of course large venues for live music in Japan, too, but these small more personalized and community based venues provide a place for more intimate performances, or jam sessions or other live music events for amateur, semi-pro and full-time musicians, including those on regional tours.