Mark Katz

Keynote Lecture (specific time undetermined)

Modern Analog Listening and the Transculturation of the Japanese Jazz Kissa

In the mid-2010s, Japanese-influenced cocktail bars with high-end analog sound systems began opening throughout North America and Europe. Early examples include Bar Shiru (Oakland, 2015), Spiritland and Tokyo Record Bar (London and New York, 2016), and Fréquence and Shibuya Hi-Fi (Paris and Seattle, 2018), with a new crop appearing in the early post-pandemic years. The model of these establishments is the Japanese jazu kissa, or jazz café, in which music (often 20th-century U.S. jazz) is typically played on turntables and experienced in near silence. (The history of these spaces, more broadly described as ongaku kissaten, or music cafes, dates to 1929.) This paper argues that although these establishments explicitly invoke the Japanese model (discursively, aesthetically, and technologically), they do so in the service of an elite Western perspective that embraces analog technology and communal listening as part of a broader “slow movement” that rejects 21st-century digital solitude. Drawing on fieldwork at nearly three-dozen sites in Japan, Europe, and the United States, I identify points of connection and disjunction between the Japanese and Western models. Among my findings are that in the West, analog is more a visual than a sonic phenomenon; that Western cultural expectations limit the possibility of listening in silence in U.S. and European establishments; that in the West, digital technologies, though decentered, nevertheless serve an important role in terms of playback and promotion; and that more recently opened establishments in Tokyo seem to emulate the Westernized take on the Japanese kissa more than the traditional model (or represent a blend of the two). Most broadly, this paper participates in ongoing scholarly conversations about musical transculturation and the 21st-century analog revival.

Please note that this is an ongoing project and that the author will be conducting research in Seoul prior to the conference on LP bars, venues similar to Japanese ongaku kissaten.

Mark Katz is John P. Barker Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Rap and Redemption on Death Row (2024) co-authored with incarcerated musician Alim Braxton. His other books include Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (2004, rev. 2010), Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World (2019), and Music and Technology: A Very Short Introduction (2022). He is the Founding Director of the U.S. State Department hip hop cultural diplomacy program, Next Level (established 2014), and in 2016 he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association for his contributions to musicology. He is a former music department chair and served as Director of UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities (2014–18). He is currently preparing a third edition of his first book, Capturing Sound.  


🔗 The Other Keynote Speaker: Kozo Hiramatsu

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