Sakura Blooming / Exciting Times with Jungle Mic - One Road

There are many roads to professional musicianship, and we just so happen to be on the one I think might be the most common: the one that winds through a bunch of local live houses, connections with local, then regional, then national bands and event hosts and club owners, and finally people who are willing to pay you adequately for your efforts...all the while learning, learning, learning from those who have come before you and "levelling up" as quickly as you can.

Last weekend was a Jungle Mic weekend. On Saturday, we organized a combined Fall In / Jungle Jamboree (Fall In is the name of the event a buddy band of ours, Es, organizes frequently - except they disbanded after this time because their guitarist is quitting...which I didn't realize until the next day because I usually don't listen to the serious stories in between songs) at Kyoto Muse, our usual place.

I had a lot to do in the afternoon/early evening (i.e. dance practice for the show at that same event, with Ikeyan and Yamaa, as well as meeting Misa for the second-last time before she moves to Shizuoka for her work, which I found out on Saturday and took a couple of days to process, because I thought she was going to stay in Kyoto...Shizuoka city is about 4 hours by normal train or one by Shinkansen), which is why I missed some of the earlier gigs, including one by the band of our recording/mixing engineer at Studio Rag. You can't have 'em all...

Anyway, after some confusion about who had to perform what when, Ikeyan, Yamaa and I all separately made it more or less in time for our dance show. A house show this time, and I'm glad to say it turned out quite interesting. Routines are always more difficult to perform smoothly than you think (no way you're going to be able to do them fluently with ~8 hours of practice), but there were plenty of solo/duet parts which were more improvised and probably more fun to watch. Overall, though we made many mistakes, the feeling wasn't bad, and since the audience was rather unfamiliar with this kind of dance, we probably managed to convey almost as much as we could have even if everything went perfectly. I liked the part where we were looking for the piano sound, I found it first, ate it with a satisfied face, went crazy, then they found it, went crazy, and we all had a blast.

More than the performance, though, last week's daytime practices were really fun, reminiscing about last summer with the sun out at 20 degrees. Beautiful! The sakura are beginning to bloom and I expect full bloom (i.e. riverside parties and gigs every day) in about a week! Ikeyan and Yamaa are both graduating, and though I'm happy to announce that Ikeyan is staying in Kyoto (and in fact moving closer to me), Yamaa (who has recently been added to the business team now consisting of her, me, Yokoo and Freddy) is moving to Tokyo. In other words, this was probably the last show for a long time, if not forever, performed by "Heartbeat Collective", the team that was first put together for Ego's Zero show last year - the first show I ever performed at. Wow, old times. The year is drawing to a close, and all kinds of interesting feelings are bubbling up ... but more about that another time.

Just before our dance show, there was the gig by Nubo, a band from Yokohama. It was the first time I really enjoyed another band's gig at a Jungle Mic event: they played something in between rock and ska and knew how to create a good party atmosphere. At the afterparty, I spent half of the time (i.e. 3 out of 6 hours) with Nubo's bassist, Kim (JM's bassist) and Masa (the aforementioned engineer), and have good hopes for performing together with Nubo again in the future. They're a touring band though, more suited for live performance than selling CD's, so they're on the road all the time and I don't know when we can match schedules. We'll see!

Our own gig went good and bad. We had a lot of new stuff going on compared to a month ago: three new songs, background vocals by Yuuki (guitar) and me, and more rapping by me. Somehow Yuuki messed up quite a lot, and it took quite a while for us to convince him, after the gig was over, that things were quite alright. Because on the side of the audience it actually turned out to be a great gig! Two of the three new songs are uptempo, funky and easy to feel, the other new song is a true slow ballad (Evans loved it, says he can't wait for the recording), U-ta (vocals) performed much better than last time, Satoshi (drums) and Kim were very tight, I did some MCing/call-and-responsing in between songs as well which was apparently a great success. During the encore, we had an acquaintance rapper and the singer from Es come on stage and join us in a mishmash of Resound (a JM song) and a funky improvised session (which I didn't know we were going to have). It was good fun, and though impromptu things like these are never flawless, we got positive feedback from the people in charge afterwards. Keeping the funk alive! In all, the atmosphere and the communication with the audience was very good this time.

As always, there was a feedback session with the manager and the owner of the live house before we left. This time, we got what I considered to be fabulous news: 1. U-ta, though he still needs a lot of practice, is noticeably advancing. 2. For the first time in over a year (which means since way before I joined them), it was possible to see what Jungle Mic is aiming for as a band, largely due to the successful integration of my keys. Whereas a year ago (half a year before I first heard them play at the riverside) it was apparently a total mess, now the way ahead has become clearly visible and the work that needs to be done can be put into words concretely: keep going with the uptempo songs and background vocals, keep working on the crowd interaction, increase variation in the ballad-type songs, have drum and bass play a bit more freely (since Jungle Mic decided, I guess about a year ago, that they wanted to create some more mass-appeal songs, the rhythm section has suffered from excessive holding back).... now that's stuff we can work with! Not like last time, where all we got was "keep it up .. you guys have the potential, but you need to work out for yourselves what you really want", which was not directly helpful.

So the gig was a success - also according to the couple of personal friends I had in the audience. The afterparty was an event in itself. About twenty people there, mostly band members but also some friends. All-you-can-eat-and-drink for 2500 yen - yes I ate and drank a LOTTTT (God I love Japan). As mentioned before, good conversation with Nubo's bassist, Kim and Masa, and with Evans and Mariko (a friend of ours). I also got to know a former member of Jungle Mic, who was kicked out because he sucked at guitar back in the day (they used to have two guitarists around 7 years ago, just after they started), and who has apparently always been the crazy drunk at the parties. This time too, he got wasted to the point of not being able to utter anything other than caveman language, being punched and kicked around by all his friends - outside ... naked. Riiiiight, don't forget we're in Japan!

The party ended around 6 am under a bridge in Sanjo, after which I crashed at U-ta's place and he was kind enough to wake me up with the smell of pizza around 11 am. We left around 12, to pick up some other members and head for Shiga, for the second gig of the weekend. Shiga is one of the prefectures bordering Kyoto; I have plenty of friends who are from there and a couple who live there right now. It's also where Lake Biwa lies (went there to see fireworks and dance in the streets sometime last year). Anyway, this particular live house, Huckleberry (Hakkurubeeri in Japanese) was kind of in the middle of a residential-looking area with nothing interesting around. It was a lot smaller than Muse, but then Muse is really quite big. The smallness made it very easy to get a good sound, though, so soundchecking was a breeze.

This night's event was hosted by a local band which, no offense, was very amateur compared to the other performing artists that night. Accordingly, they performed first - we were third or fourth out of seven (Yuuki, considering the artists after us, thought we deserved to be later). Despite (or because!) of the middle-of-nowhereness, the somewhat improvised organization and the audience consisting of 90% girls, most of which didn't seem too impressed by anything at all (which made me, bad boy that I am, stereotype them into music-illiterate friends-living-around-the-corner of band members), the overall atmosphere was quite good, and we had a fun gig. Playing in such a small space made it much easier to put down an good stage performance, which was nice for a change, though of course we're aiming to wow bigger crowds as well.

The afterparty, though, was where most of the fun was to be had. Contrary to Kyoto-style leaving the live house for another place, tables were set up inside the live house, and the food was prepared by the owner of the place himself. 2500 yen again, but this time all-you-can-drink and plenty of food with no time limit! The food wasn't so great, probably because the owner is an alcoholic and was drunk when he made it. That guy was truly something! As nowhere else in Japan, all band members used plain form (no formal language) with him, and he was cool about it. His idea of a live house is "a place where bands that become big get their baby experiences...no need for all kinds of formalities and strictnesses, just get people together and have fun". Though it's a good philosophy and I honestly think those places need to exist, it's almost hard to believe his business can remain standing, what with the small audiences and unlimited drink sessions every night. When we asked him what he thought of Jungle Mic, having seen us for the first time, all he could reply, time after time, was "I don't really like Kyoto bands...I just like Kyoto girls", and then the conversation would change into hilarious story exchanges between some of the musicians that were more familiar with him, who had been having their own, entirely unrelated conversations a couple of metres away until that moment.

Besides explaining the fine differences between Japanese and Dutch women to the club owner, I spent most of the time talking to the (female) singer and MC (male), both around 30, of Funky Rockers. They're both very cool and had some great ideas about us (Funky Rockers, Jungle Mic, our generation) having the responsibility to change the music scene: music should be about entertainment, going to a live house should be "hey, I hear there's a good party at club X tonight, let's go check it out" rather than planning a month ahead to go support your friend's band because he needs to sell 20 tickets to be able to play at all - let the motherfucking live houses get their own customers instead of making the bands do all the advertising! ..and more of that kind of stuff. We'd played with them once before, in Muse (on an evening where Muse booked all the bands separately), but that time we didn't have much chance to talk to them. This time, we got along really well and I have very high hopes for playing with them again, hopefully a lot in Osaka (because that's where they're based)! Between the two of our groups we have plenty of party fuel to make any event fun.

One thing I talked about with FR's MC was the difference between the live music experience in Japan and in other places. I agreed with him that the majority of Japanese concertgoers is too passive, to the point of making me think they're kind of missing the whole point of the gig. It's quite hard to get people to move (as an illustration of the seriousness of this issue, Yuuki wants one of the next JM songs to be written from the "easy to make the audience move" perspective .. you know, waving your arms from left to right or other stuff I'm sure you've seen Japanese audiences do in concert videos). Now of course it's fine if you don't want to go all out dancing and prefer to enjoy the music by watching from a distance, but it seems everyone is like that. I honestly think there are few Japanese people who would understand a Manu Chao concert video. Finishing this paragraph on a good note, though, Jungle Mic does have some fans that know how to physically enjoy the gigs, and it's always very motivating to see them in the front row. I hope we can make more people get up, get down, get funky, get loose, as Teddy Pendergrass put it in his funky song.

After the afterparty, we headed home around 3/4ish. In our car were U-ta, Kim and me, singing along to Dragonball, Pokemon, Ghibli and other assorted sing-along material loudly until we were back in Kyoto. Just before going to sleep that morning, I realized how lucky I had been to meet them and be accepted into the Jungle Mic family. With the gears moving (gigs planned, our CDs being passed around to record labels, continuing work on the new Jungle Mic image (clothes and all)) and positive feedback about all the changes so far, the future is looking bright. I love these guys.