Nippon Orleans

In 2010, Yoshitaka “Z2” Tsuji found himself seven thousand miles from home, gigless in the Crescent City, playing piano in Jackson Square beside a homeless man with a broken tambourine.

He’d been there a month, and still no steady work had come his way. Back home in Osaka, a trumpeter had been telling Tsuji for years about New Orleans, saying it was better for gigs than New York City. He recommended listening to all-star entertainer, Kermit Ruffins. Tsuji had got ahold of some of Ruffins’ CD’s, familiarized himself with his songs, and when he finally arrived to New Orleans, Miki Fuji—a jazz singer and Japanese acquaintance—introduced Tsuji to Ruffins, who let him sit in on a show for a night. Tsuji was giddy; he already knew all of Ruffins’ songs. The next week, Ruffins invited him to sit in again, before inviting him to sub for two weeks while his regular pianist went on vacation. Tsuji eagerly accepted, but when the piano player returned, Tsuji went back to wooing tourists for a dollar at a time. The tambourine man—more a hype-man than a singer—“volunteered” to take a cut, and the cut grew and grew. This went on for weeks, and Tsuji, poor in English though rich in heart, tolerated the tambourine man, at least for a while.

Word began to circulate about Tsuji’s virtuosic abilities. More invites came, but they were one-offs, nothing steady. “It’s a very New Orleans story,” Tsuji shared one day over coffee in the Treme, where he and his wife, the trombone extraordinaire Haruka Kikuchi, live. Tsuji, now 41, admitted that if his lot had not improved, he might have ended up in New York after all, or shelved his dream altogether and returned to Japan. 

But things did begin to turn around. The local soul/R&B singer, Michael Baptiste, needed a new pianist and offered Tsuji a part-time job. Baptiste gave him a burned CD with forty untitled songs. Later, he gave him old set lists, but Tsuji didn’t know which title corresponded with which track. After some detective work, struggling to understand the lyrics in the choruses, he was able to figure it out, eventually learning over two hundred songs, mostly Motown hits. In the two years he worked for Baptiste, he fully developed  his New Orleans chops. He kept subbing here and there, including, on occasion, for Ruffins.

And then in 2012, like an answered prayer, Ruffins’ pianist retired. Tsuji was the first person he called. 

There is a small but thriving community of professional Japanese musicians in New Orleans, many of them personnel for some of the most renowned local acts. They’ve come to the birthplace of jazz because music and its appreciation are omnipresent here like nowhere else. John Boutté, the singer who composed the theme song for David Simon’s HBO series Treme, has a Japanese bass player, Nobu Ozaki, in his band. Blues guitarist June Yamagishi (also featured in Treme) has been living in New Orleans for decades. The drummer Mayumi Yamazaki has worked with Cyril Neville and many others. The pianist Mari Watanabe regularly performs at Preservation Hall. The list goes on. Everyone knows one another, and though the size of the community fluctuates, Tsuji and Kikuchi reckon there are thirteen Japanese expat musicians, give or take, in the scene today. 

The couple met in 2012 in the second line of “Uncle” Lionel Batiste’s jazz funeral. Hundreds had gathered to celebrate the life of the Treme Brass Band’s bass drummer, and Kikuchi—on her seventh trip to New Orleans—had brought her horn, just in case. Tsuji approached her in the throng, speaking Japanese. The two musicians became friends, and the friendship turned into love.

Japan, they say, has the largest jazz fandom in the world, and this love for the genre dates back a century. In the 1920s, jazz coffee shops sprung up all over the country. The music was like a window into a cosmopolitan future, providing a new generation with an escape from the strict traditions of years past, a reason to get together and party. The Second World War put a pause to Western “decadence,” forcing musicians and fans to lay low until two successive “booms” ensued. The first came in the 1950s, when worldwide tours brought such jazz giants as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, among others, to Japan. Then, in the early 1960s, another wave of icons visited the Land of the Rising Sun, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis.

Lewis played a major role in the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1940s and 1950s. When he came to Japan, he helped seed the “trad” revival there, too. At one of Lewis’s shows in Kyoto in 1963, a young trumpeter named Yoshio Toyama and his banjo-playing wife, Keiko, sat in the audience. The next year they caught a Louis Armstrong show. They were so bowled over by dreams of New Orleans that in 1964 they visited the city on a student tour. Four years later, they immigrated there and stuck around until 1973. Today, Yoshio is known worldwide as the “Japanese Satchmo” because of his obsession and musical imitations of Armstrong. In 1994, the couple launched the Wonderful World Jazz Foundation, an Armstrong fan club and nonprofit. As of 2018, the Toyamas’ charity has donated more than 850 instruments and $130,000 toward musical education for children living in poor parts of the city. 

The Toyamas see themselves as jazz ambassadors to Japan, and New Orleans has more than recognized the effort. In 2008, they received a key to the city, and at the 2018 Satchmo Summerfest, a festival dedicated to the music and life of Louis Armstrong, Yoshio was given a “Spirit of Satchmo” award. 

This is the legacy Tsuji and Kikuchi inherited, though Kikuchi’s path to New Orleans began at an earlier stage in life. 

Kikuchi, 33, discovered jazz in high school under the guidance of Ken Aoki, now one of the most renowned traditional banjoists in the world. Growing up in Chiba Prefecture just oustide of Tokyo, she had been playing the piano since she was three and dabbled with violin, but after meeting Aoki, she decided to return to the trombone. (She’d played a year in the school brass band, and quit.) With Aoki as her teacher and mentor, Kikuchi began to dive deep into the jazz musical canon, preferring the original New Orleans style.

 At the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Kikuchi studied musicology and continued playing “trad” jazz on the side. Every chance she got, she accompanied her friend to the New Orleans Jazz Club at nearby Wasede University in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and became a member. The club began in the 1957 and still exists today as the only jazz club of its kind. Among its members is the frequent Preservation Hall performer Mari Watanabe, who in 1985 visited New Orleans on a student trip and never left. 

I sat one day with Tsuji and Kikuchi in their flat, where an electric piano sits in the living room, posters of jazz heroes adorn the walls, and Kikuchi’s trombones lean in corners. There are dozens of photos of Japanese friends tacked to one wall, tiled around a U.S. map, musicians all of them, taken when they visited the city to check out the scene.

I asked Kikuchi what it was like for her following in the footsteps of, say, Kid Ory or Sidney Bechet, and she said: “I was super nervous at the beginning of my New Orleans life. I’m Asian and I am female and I play the trombone with a New Orleans jazz band. So many visitors from other places want to listen to New Orleans music played by New Orleans musicians, and I don’t look like a New Orleans musician.” 

Watching Tsuji play is a bit like watching Jimi Hendrix, all speed and feeling. A certain singular energy exudes from his fingers when he touches the keys. When the music grooves, he bounces in his seat, his shoulders rise and fall, he leans side to side as though steering a small plane.

Having lived in New Orleans  for more than six years now, Kikuchi, like her husband, has proven herself time and again on the local music scene. Since 2016, Kikuchi has produced an eight-volume (and growing) collection called Japan: New Orleans Collection. The CD compilations—recorded in a New Orleans studio—feature ensembles comprised of Japanese visitors and New Orleans-based musicians playing New Orleans jazz. 

She can’t keep up with requests to perform, at home and abroad, whether solo or with her bands: her own trio and the all-lady sextet Shake ‘Em Up Jazz Band. In the past, she has also played with the Grammy-nominated Mardi Gras Indian funk band, Cha Wa, and the legendary radio station WWOZ has invited her several times to play on air. When describing her style, they put it this way: “Kikuchi sounds like she may as well have been born and raised in Treme.”

As for Tsuji, he continues to work full-time for Kermit Ruffins & The Barbecue Swingers and—along with June Yamagishi—in Kevin Morris and Uptown Production, a funk outfit led by Ruffins’ bassist. The couple and Kevin Morris also play gospel most Sundays at the Second Nazarene Baptist Church in Algiers. 

The last time I saw Shake ‘Em Up, they packed out the Frenchmen Street venue, The Spotted Cat. Kikuchi sat stage right in a floral cotton dress, her bangs straight as a ruler and the tips of her hair dyed pink. Theirs is the kind of music you hear in barroom scenes from Roaring Twenties period pieces—real head-bobbing, swinging tunes, with a scratchy washboard backbeat that commands a body to move. With clarinet and trumpet lacing melodies around one another, and guitar and bass keeping rhythm, the space opens for Kikuchi to enter with her searing solos and swooping bleats. 

And although he’s not a Christian, he prays every time he plays in that church.

When I asked her one day if she had any dreams left unfulfilled, Kikuchi mentioned only one. “It’s a little funny,” she said, laughing. “But I believe that Disney will make a live-action version of The Princess and the Frog, and I want to play the music for the film.” The Leah Chase-inspired New Orleans dream-story is a favorite of hers, plus the soundtrack features Trombone Shorty and Dr. John.

In the past year and a half, the couple has married and had a son. Not long ago, Kikuchi was featured on Good Morning America after a video clip of her went viral. In the clip, Kikuchi sits and plays trombone at a gig somewhere in Europe, while her nine-month-old son dangles from her chest, sleeping, wearing hearing protection—a tender portrait of the challenges of being both a working musician and young mother.  

I first saw Ruffins and his band at their regular Friday night gig at the Blue Nile on Frenchmen. Tsuji sat at a grand piano, a white newsboy cap above a bouncing ponytail. 

Watching Tsuji play is a bit like watching Jimi Hendrix, all speed and feeling. A certain singular energy exudes from his fingers when he touches the keys. When the music grooves, he bounces in his seat, his shoulders rise and fall, he leans side to side as though steering a small plane.

After months of attending the couple’s gigs, last July I finally made it to a service at the Algiers church. I came with my Japanese friends Rei and Megumi, who had introduced me to the musical couple in the first place. Only Tsuji would play; Kikuchi was in France with Shake ‘Em Up, preparing to travel to Sweden for the next gig of their two-week tour. 

Before the service, Tsuji took his seat at the keyboard, playing elegant background music as churchgoers—mostly elderly women—filed in and filled pews. At some point the pastor asked visitors to stand, and everyone welcomed us there, shaking our hands. A woman turned around and gave me a hug.

The music was lively gospel, wonderfully loud, with Tsuji on the electric piano, alongside an organist, electric bass, a drummer, and a percussionist. I counted a 17-member choir. At some points, it felt like the roof might rise from the walls. 

The sermon was from the Book of Matthew: the miracle of Jesus walking on water. In the story, Peter follows Jesus, and he notices the miracle taking shape, that he is part of this miracle. But when fear overcomes him, he begins to sink. The preacher invited everyone to consider the error in Peter’s judgment, and he reminded us of the point: when things get tough, one needs only to keep faith. Members of the congregation clapped and called out “Amen” and “Praise Jesus”. The musicians entered the cacophony one by one, grooving on a funky gospel number of the Herbie Hancock school. The choir swayed, the soloist sang, and the entire congregation got on their feet.  

After the service, I asked Tsuji what (besides payment) he gained from playing so regularly at the church. Rei and Megumi took turns interpreting, as usual. 

Tsuji explained that because people aren’t there to see him play at the Second Nazarene, it’s simply a “pure” experience, a palette cleanser, before a busy week of playing nighttime bar gigs. And although he’s not a Christian, he prays every time he plays in that church.

 He never expected that things would work out so well. He had thought to give himself three years in New Orleans. But, keeping the faith, here he is, ten years in, rooted into the community, a respected jazz musician. 

Through Rei, he said, “There are different drinks out there, coke or beer or whiskey, but the church is, for me, like pure water. Until I’d played at the church, I’d never tasted pure water. Nothing ever tasted so good.”