Jiro Inagaki never settled into one music community. The 90-year-old saxophonist says that while he entered the industry via jazz, he was always interested in how the style could intersect with other genres, including rock.
“If you were a player like me, you’d go to the rock community and be seen as just a jazz guy,” Inagaki says in an interview at his apartment near Shinjuku Gyoen National Park. His son, Masayuki, joins us as well. “When I went to the jazz scene, I was viewed as a rock player. You couldn’t really belong to one group.”
Inagaki didn’t heed this separation of musical styles, though, and his open-mindedness is what has helped his work persevere through the years. Finding himself caught up in enka ballads, the hippie movement, city pop and more, Inagaki’s jazz reveals his curiosity about the sonic worlds around him and an enthusiasm for tinkering with genres.
He offers an epochal memory: When he departed Tokyo in 1969 for a brief trip to the United States, he favored the crisp and preppy Ivy League look. He landed in Haneda Airport about a week later looking like an American hippie with messy hair, ready to bring a rock sound to his jazz.
Now comes a new release that zeroes in on Inagaki’s “jazz rock” era — “WaJazz Legends: Jiro Inagaki — Selected by Yusuke Ogawa.” Created in cooperation with France-based label 180g, Koenji record store Universounds and HMV Record Shop, the compilation highlights his golden age from 1968 to 1980, when Inagaki and his band, Jiro Inagaki & His Soul Media, were at their most creative. It’s also the period that listeners abroad have “discovered” in the past decade, spurred by interest in older Japanese music and YouTube algorithms pushing uploads of his 1975 full-length “Funky Stuff” to eager ears; the mellow song “Breeze” is particularly popular online.
“The His Soul Media era is usually grouped with ‘jazz rock,’ but Inagaki’s musicality was much more diverse,” says Yusuke Ogawa, owner of Universounds, Japanese jazz expert and curator of the Inagaki compilation. “I want people to become obsessed with the whole range of his sound and think, ‘Wow — Jiro Inagaki did so much more than “Breeze!”’”
One person who is bemused by all the attention is Inagaki himself. “Are you sure this is good enough for you guys. ... Is my material that good to you,” he replies when I ask what he makes of the recent international love for his work.
He’s effusive with praise for other musicians both in Japan and overseas, spending long stretches talking about what made collaborators like American jazz saxophonist Steve Marcus special or the historical importance of Canadian player Georgie Auld. However, when Inagaki is the subject of our conversation, he’s humble. His answers are short at times, in part because he can’t locate the memory, but other times, he simply doesn’t seem interested in tooting his own horn.
Inagaki was born in Tokyo in 1933. He grew up in Shibuya Ward’s Hatagaya neighborhood and says his first encounter with music came via his involvement with a Hawaiian-themed band in the area. He clarifies that the group actually played contemporary pop and country but used island-born instruments they had on hand. This led him to play in various bands as a teen. Then, he heard a live jazz show around the age of 17. “It was different from everything I’d ever done,” he says. “It was something I could try.”
He bought his first saxophone soon after. Inagaki says it was a secondhand instrument from a high school classmate who played with the big band jazz ensemble Nobuo Hara and His Sharps & Flats. Frontman Nobuo Hara is known as the man responsible for popularizing big band jazz in Japan after World War II.
Inagaki committed himself to jazz, and during the 1950s, he found himself in numerous groups such as Frankie Sakai & City Slickers and The Crazy Cats, led by Hajime Hana. Eventually in the ’60s, he signed with Nippon Columbia, where he initially offered jazz covers of popular enka songs.
“It was a trend at the time, and a lot of mainstream jazz players didn’t want to do it,” Inagaki says. “I was pretty open about trying new things, so when the offer came to me, I tried it.”
Part of the deal with Nippon Columbia was that if a release sold a certain amount of copies, they would let Inagaki record whatever he wanted as a reward. As it turned out, the saxophonist was adept at turning enka into commercial gold; a table in one corner of his current apartment is covered in what looks like over a dozen bronze statuettes. Each award signifies a hit, many from the jazz-enka boom years. They also represent permission slips from the music industry to experiment.
In 1969, he made his fateful trip to the U.S. with fellow jazz musician Takeshi Inomata, where he was amazed by the jazz-rock whirlwinds created by bands like Blood, Sweat & Tears (“They taught me it was OK for jazz artists to like rock and incorporate it into your music”). That same year, he assembled His Soul Media.
The two events — coupled with label leeway earned via his strong sales — led Inagaki to dive into jazz rock, starting with 1970’s psych-smeared “Head Rock,” which featured him playing the sax alongside blasts of electric guitar. He continued to explore this sonic path over the next few years on albums like “Jazz And Rock ‘Out’” and “Something,” a collaboration with Marcus. This decision to experiment left him on the edge of the Japanese jazz community and banned from certain venues like Shinjuku Pit Inn.
He wasn’t married to the sound, though, and one of his most recognizable hits, 1975’s “Funky Stuff,” delivers on the titular adjective. Inagaki kept exploring his sound alongside His Soul Media in the ’70s — captured in its eclectic approach to what jazz could be on the 180g compilation — while also crossing over into other areas. In the latter half of the decade, he started working with Japanese pop maestro Eiichi Ohtaki’s Niagara agency, contributing sax to albums by Ohtaki and Minako Yoshida. Fittingly, Inagaki found himself at the heart of the birth of city pop, another musical style well-loved by modern listeners online.
“(Ohtaki and his label) knew about me, and, since I did jazz-rock, they figured I could work in pop as well,” he says. “Other jazz players — you ask them to do a saxophone solo and it’s too ... jazzy.”
The ’70s presented all kinds of opportunities for special moments Inagaki still holds dear. He performed at Hakone Aphrodite in 1971, the first outdoor music festival in Japanese history, headlined by Pink Floyd. In 1975, he played with Stevie Wonder when the American star did shows at the Nippon Budokan.
“My band name happened to have the word ‘soul’ in it, so Stevie assumed we knew how to play soul music,” Inagaki says. “He called me after the first night, asking if I could play the next day. I asked, ‘Do you have a sheet to learn from?’ They did not, but gave me a cassette tape of a show they did in Hawaii. Thankfully, I knew his music already.”
Inagaki kept playing jazz through the 1980s and beyond, most notably with pianist Norio Maeda’s Wind-Breakers, an outfit he was a member of until the leader’s death in the late 2010s. He also kept busy by writing and performing for pop songs and other artists.
“I always wondered, ‘What is he trying to do?’” says Masayuki when asked what he made of his dad’s career. “He wasn’t really mainstream and he would do bits and pieces of different things. He was off on a sidetrack, working behind the scenes. He was a person of subculture, and back then people didn’t get it. But that’s praised today.”
Whether Inagaki wants to bask in the attention or not, his career is finally being appreciated for its eclectic nature, transforming a sidetrack artist into a pillar of Japanese jazz for a new generation.
The key to Inagaki’s longevity? His devotion to music and jazz in particular.
“I never could find an answer for what jazz really is,” Inagaki says. “I was always seeking it, and that’s why I kept going, even if I suffered sometimes. I wanted to know.”
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