Notes and tones: Longtime Westminster professor writes where jazz meets Japan

April is Jazz Appreciation Month. It’s also National Poetry Month. And the 2024 Unbound Book Festival wraps up Sunday.

So it only seemed apropos to exchange emails with my friend Wayne Zade — a jazz lover and enthusiast, poet, author and a Westminster College professor emeritus in English — about his recently published book, “Nippon Soul” (Auxarczen Press). Subtitled “Jazz in Japan — Interviews 2000-2012,” the book obviously has been years in the making.

I’m not sure where or when I met Zade. He pins it to a Denny Zeitlin concert he produced at Westminster and that I attended. Perhaps. Doesn’t matter. As Zade says in the “Nippon Soul” preface: “We became fast friends.”

That part, and much more, remains true today.

A Windy City Southsider, Zade took to jazz as a youth. By the time he and wife Cathy became lifelong Fulton-ians in 1976, he was deep into jazz and its purveyors.

“Nippon Soul” is a collection of interviews with players and industry people centered on respective experiences of jazz in Japan. Admittedly a narrow focus, it’s so much more than that. It’s a series of conversations between a knowledgeable, curious author and fan and some seminal modern jazz musicians and those who do their work behind the scenes. What follows is an edited selection of our email exchanges. “Nippon Soul” is available via Amazon in print and Kindle formats.

How did the idea of the book take hold?

The book idea came long after I started thinking about jazz and Japan. I took advantage of Title VI grant funds that Westminster got for faculty to develop international studies courses. Some of the funds allowed me to travel to Japan and to meet people. Some of the people suggested I talk with others, and they suggested others, and they suggested others, and I just kept going.

Did you consider writing magazine-type profiles of the musicians you talked with, or were you always set on a straight Q&A interview approach?

I found that I really liked the interview format and that — no surprise here — musicians are some of the greatest storytellers I've ever been around. I taught the course three times and used the interviews to supplement textbooks, etc. I was reluctant to depart from the interview format and somehow turn the interviews into profiles or essays, which a few editors suggested to me.

How did you move from having a collection of disparate — or somewhat random — interviews to envisioning them strung together in a book format? 

I tried publishing a collection of interviews but had no luck in doing so. After a certain point, I kind of gave up on the book idea. Partly I was frustrated by the "rejections" I'd gotten. Partly also I got very busy in my job and family and couldn't devote the time to it. The whole thing kind of sat in my basement for months. Then I went on Laird Oakie's radio program, mentioned it, and the people who published it heard the program and wanted to do it practically on the spot. So I put together what I had and what I had access to and ran with it.

I noticed while there is some overlapping content, there is different subject matter covered as you move from one artist to another. I also took note that the 27 published interviews are arranged alphabetically by last name. What is the reasoning behind organizing “Nippon Soul” in this manner rather than, say, somehow weaving a theme from one artist to the next, or, arranging content chronologically, based on when the interviews took place?

To be truthful, I couldn't say exactly when some of the interviews were done. I did I have a set of questions that I stuck to, although other things came up [during] conversations. So the "book," which I arranged alphabetically from the beginning, [was my way] to maybe even the playing field; [it] was just a way of bringing these conversations together.

How did you decide who to interview and, quite frankly, when to stop?

The choice of musicians was in part governed by who was passing through Missouri or by when I could get to New York or St. Louis. I did try for a variety of instruments played by the musicians. I wish I could have gotten more Japanese musicians involved, but after a certain point, there were either travel or financial or language problems in doing that.

You know a lot about jazz and jazz history. Nonetheless, what are some examples of what you learned about individual players, about their careers of which you were not aware? What are some of the surprise informational “kernels” you gleaned?  

I learned that virtually every player I talked with was happy to go to Japan to play. Not only to make good money, but to carry the music around the world and to follow the examples of Art Blakey, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who were the original ambassadors of the music there in the '50s. Many also spoke about inspiring Japanese music students to come to the States to study jazz, mainly at Berklee [College of Music in Boston], but at other music schools as well. A good many Japanese jazz musicians rank among the world's finest now.

How come you ended the book with Adam Tavel’s poem about Hiroshima with a photo of John Coltrane?

I came across Adam Tavel's poem quite by accident and admired it very much. Because I spent my teaching career in poetry, I somehow couldn't resist including a poem I admired in the book. There's a wealth of "jazz poetry" out there. Adam was very happy to be included. The poem is about world peace, and that's a theme that runs through the book — how Japan and the United States came together somehow after the horrors of WWII.

What did you hope to accomplish by publishing the book — beyond the obvious self-satisfaction of seeing your work come to fruition? What would you like people to take or gain from reading the book/the interviews, which have a more conversational, rather than academic, feel to them?

I'm no scholar, and the book is probably no more than "jazz buff history," as one of my subject's dissertation director warned him against. There's precious little written about jazz and Japan.

The book is, I hope, a humble attempt to supplement the very few books about jazz and Japan, in English for an American audience, and they happen to be written by academics. I wanted to have a more personal feel to the book, in the voices of the musicians and the industry professionals I talked with. I started this project more than two decades ago. I'm glad I got to bring it out while I am healthy. The book was very much a "retirement" project for me. A labor of love, really.

Jon W. Poses is executive director of the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series. Reach him at jazznbsbl@socket.net.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Notes and tones: Longtime Westminster professor writes where jazz meets Japan