Jazz
爵士音樂

A few years ago a friend took me to Samurai, a jazz bar in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district whose owner, a haiku poet, stood behind the bar surrounded by thousands of maneki neko—smiling, waving cat figurines. He had a primitive video camera trained on the sleeve of the record album he was playing, and he projected that image onto the wall. Samurai had its own quirks, but it wasn’t an unusual type of place: The jazz bar and its cousin, the jazz kissaten, a coffee shop focused on jazz, are shrines to recorded music, dreamlands for high-fidelity obsessives. They offer a kind of jazz experience based on pure appreciation of the act of listening.
幾年前一個朋友帶我去了 Samurai——一家位于東京新宿區的爵士酒吧，酒吧老板是一位俳句詩人。他站在吧臺后面，周圍是數以千計的招財貓——微笑著，揮動手臂。他用一個老式的放映機播放膠片，把影像投射到墻上。這家店有自己的風格，但在日本并非少見，比如爵士吧和爵士咖啡館——專注于爵士樂的咖啡店，熱衷于播放音樂磁帶，以成為高保真樂迷們的夢想天堂，通過純粹的傾聽來享受爵士樂所帶來的快樂。

In Tokyo I track down James Catchpole, an American expat and jazz expert who goes by the very Japanese-sounding nickname of Mr. OK Jazz, to understand what’s happening right now to Japanese jazz culture. "When these kissa started back in the '50s and '60s, Tokyo apartments were too small to play music in," Catchpole says. "Imported records were really expensive. Jazz kissa were the only places in the city where fans could listen to the music they loved." The coffee shops became hideaways where jazz lovers could relax, hear new records and learn about trends like free jazz from others who knew the music well. In the ’60s, when jazz was allied with Japanese university counterculture, jazz kissa became organizing centers for the student protests that rocked Japan. But of course Japanese people no longer need to visit a bar or café to listen to recorded jazz. "Are jazz kissa going to survive?" I ask Catchpole.
在東京，為了理解現在日本的爵士文化，我找到了凱奇波爾。他是一位美國移民和爵士樂專家，周圍追捧他的日本人送給他一個綽號為ok爵士先生。“當這種爵士咖啡館在5、60年代剛剛興起時，東京的房子還太小，所以不足以播放音樂。”他說道，“并且進口的磁碟非常昂貴。所以城市里的樂迷們只有在這種咖啡館里才能聽到自己喜歡的音樂。”這樣的咖啡店成為爵士迷們放松心情的桃花源，來到這里欣賞新的樂曲，從深諳爵士樂的人那里了解像自由爵士樂一類的流行風尚。在60年代，當爵士樂與日本大學的反主流文化結盟后，爵士咖啡吧成為學生們組織抗議的根據地。但當然，日本人現在不再需要去酒吧或咖啡館來欣賞磁帶爵士樂了。我問凱奇波爾“那么爵士咖啡吧還會繼續存在嗎？”

"Go to Kissa Sakaiki and find out," he says.
“去sakaiki咖啡吧找答案吧”他說。

Tokyo's tiny cafés, bars and restaurants are notoriously difficult to locate. Even with a GPS-equipped iPhone, a print atlas and the help of police guarding a nearby embassy, I spend half an hour wandering the back streets of Yotsuya, a residential Tokyo neighborhood not far from Shinjuku, before I turn the corner and see the discreet sign for Sakaiki.
東京的微型咖啡店、酒吧和餐館特別難找。即使用GPS定位功能的iphone，一張地圖冊，并且在附近大使館保安的幫助下，我還是在臨近新宿地區的yotsuya居民區的小街里轉了半個小時，轉過一個街角才發現隱秘的sakaiki店鋪標志。

What makes places like Sakaiki or the Bob Dylan bar survive and sometimes prosper is the fragmentation of bar, café and restaurant culture in Tokyo. An eight-seat pub stands out in New York as supremely small, yet in Tokyo there are at least three nightlife neighborhoods consisting almost entirely of eight-seat bars. You don’t need many fans of whatever it is you’re into to support a bar, café or restaurant devoted to that obsession.
像sakaiki或者鮑勃迪倫酒吧做之所以能夠生存甚至繁榮起來，主要應歸因于東京破碎的酒吧、咖啡館以及小餐館文化。在紐約一個八個座位的酒吧會顯得極其狹小，而在東京至少三個夜生活地區完全都是由這類型酒吧組成。無論如何，你并不需要太多樂迷來支撐這樣專門的酒吧、咖啡廳或者餐館。

When I enter Sakaiki, owner Fumito Fukuchi, wearing a gray newsboy cap turned backward, waves me to the bar. Seated next to me is a Swedish free-jazz clarinetist speaking English to a group of Japanese. I tell Fukuchi that Mr. OK Jazz sent me. He nods a welcome and serves me a cold beer. The place is small, warm and gently lit, with a green-shaded banker’s lamp shining on the album cover of the record he’s playing. I ask Fukuchi how he came to run Sakaiki.
當我進入sakaiki，帶著灰色報童帽的老板fukuchi便向我招手，帶我進去。坐在我旁邊的是一個瑞典的自由爵士樂吹奏者，正在操著英語與一群日本人交談。我告訴fukuchi是ok爵士先生叫我來的。他點頭表示歡迎，給了我一杯冰鎮啤酒。這地方很小，但很暖和。一盞墨綠色的銀行家臺燈在唱片封面上閃著柔和的光。我問fukuchi為什么要經營這這家sakaiki。

"I was a salaryman working in IT until 2007," he tells me, as he cleans, inspects and preps the next record in his rotation. "Jazz kissa were my hobby," he says, leading me to a coffee table covered in matchboxes from the jazz kissa of Tokyo. He picks up a matchbook that reads, "Eagle." "This is the first one I ever visited. It’s right here in Yotsuya. I read the owner’s book about jazz when I was a teenager in Hokkaido. As soon as I came to Tokyo, I headed for Eagle." Many of the matchbooks Fukuchi flips through are from jazz kissa that have long been closed. And all the other jazz kissa he knows of in Tokyo, he tells me, are run by men a decade or two older than he is—and he's 41.
“直到2007年之前我都是一個在IT行業工作的工薪族，”他一邊清理、檢查并且為下次循環記錄做準備，一邊和我說。“爵士咖啡館是我的愛好”他邊說邊領著我到了放滿了來自于東京爵士咖啡館火柴盒的茶幾邊。他拾起一個火柴盒并讀到“Eagle，這是我曾經去過的第一個爵士咖啡館，它就在這兒，四谷。當我在北海道，還是個孩子的時候，我讀了那間咖啡館主人有關爵士的書籍。我一到東京，就直奔Eagle而去。”Fukuchi收集的許多火柴盒都來自于已經關閉許久了的爵士咖啡館。他告訴我說，他所知道的在東京的所有其他咖啡館都由比他大十幾二十幾的人在運營著——而他已經41歲了。

The obvious question is why go out of your way to hear recorded music with other people when technology has made it easy to listen alone? The answer comes to me as I look around the room at the people brought together by the music Sakaiki has collected: International jazz musicians, local workers and jazz fans from all over the city are here because they appreciate the act of listening to a record together. It’s a pleasure that anyone who grew up before the era of the Walkman and iTunes can appreciate. What’s uncertain is whether the next generation will cherish the same experience.
最顯而易見的問題是為什么當現在技術已經使你很容易能找到想聽的音樂的時候，你還需要和別人一塊去聽錄制音樂？當我環顧房間，看見因為Sakaiki收集的音樂而聚集在一起的是什么類型的人時，答案就不言自明了：是國際爵士音樂家，當地的工人以及來自于這個城市各個地方的爵士粉絲們，他們來到這里是因為他們欣賞這種聚在一起聽錄制音樂的行為。很高興在這個擁有Walkman和iTunes的時代之前長大的人能夠欣賞這樣的行為。但我并不確定我們的下一代是否將會珍惜這樣的經歷。
來源:可可英語 http://www.ccdyzl.cn/read/201407/311672.shtml