What the Seventies Left Behind

Japanese jazz from the seventies has a specific gravity to it that I find difficult to explain to people who haven’t heard it. It’s not background music and it’s not trying to be American jazz, even though it came out of exactly that tradition—it processed the whole thing through some distinctly Japanese quality of attention, turning it precise and melancholy and occasionally very funny. Ryo Fukui’s Scenery has been my default album for every morning that needs rescuing. Put on the title track and something in the noise of the day actually quiets down. The seventies in Japan produced a lot of this—city pop’s more introverted cousin, late-night piano records, modal experiments that never feel academic. If you’ve been sleeping on it, now is a good time to wake up.