The Listening Bar Edition

Louis here. It’s the final night of my first trip to Japan, and while I could talk about any number of this country’s wonderful, WITI-aligned customs—the services that cart your heavy bags around the city so that you can walk hands-free, say, or the total silence on the subways—there’s a reason I spent my final night returning to a listening bar I’d first visited earlier in the trip.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that Tokyo is full of these bars, where the bartender is also a veteran vinyl crate digger, with rows and rows of their record collection lining the shelves behind them. Inside, drinkers sit mostly in silence, enjoying the bartender’s selection of old records—which he’ll change song by song, rather than album by album—as they crackle out of high quality speakers.

On my first visit to this bar—Bar B-10 in Ebisu—I was stunned into greedy silence by the journey our bartender took us on, from Dr. John to Jesse Davis and J.D. Souther, by way of Cat Power and Roy Orbison, with a brief pause to play his concert DVD of The Last Waltz, after he quietly noticed the concert’s logo was on the cap I was wearing.

But on this final night, he was alone when I arrived. And as it turned out, he would take us on an even more specific ride.

Why is this interesting?

About half an hour into my return visit, as more people had showed up, and I had begun to be a little more vocal about how much I was enjoying the selection, our maestro asked me with a little grin if I knew what he was doing. I didn’t, of course, but he told me: Every song we’d heard for the last twenty minutes, across six different records, had featured the same session drummer (Steve Gadd). The reveal was delightful—not only had he pulling off such an idiosyncratic move without any fanfare, but it’s also just always a thrill to be in the presence of someone who is truly nerding out.

Of course, Spotify makes it easy to create a “Radio” station for any song, and create something of a journey that way, but for now at least, only a human who’s put in the research hours could create a dance like this. After two nights of real musical education on this trip, I’m already grieving that I won’t be back for some time. But the experience of being invited into his formula, even for just a few seconds, reminded me of something else: Oftentimes, the best way to understand more about the people in a new destination isn’t to keep moving constantly so you see it all. Instead, you can show up time and again at the same spot, just to watch and learn. (LC)

Quick links:

Those Steve Gadd-featuring records he pulled from, if you were wondering. (His full discography is mind-bending.)

• Patti Austin, End of a Rainbow

• Joe Cocker, Stingray

• Judy Collins, Judith

• Jim Croce, I Got A Name

• Roberta Flack, Blue Lights in the Basement

• Paul Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years