FClose your eyes and imagine the scene. It’s almost 7 p.m. and you’ve just landed at Shelter, a small bar with a discreet front, lost in an anonymous street in Hachioji, about forty kilometers west of Tokyo. Inside, a chandelier made of incandescent bulbs illuminates with its soft light half a dozen sofas with soft cushions. In a few strategic places, the exposed stone walls have been covered with a thick layer of acoustic foam which sports a skin that is sometimes wavy, sometimes jagged. At the back of the room, you can make out a tiny bar, of fairly basic composition, on which sit five or six bottles – no doubt very good sake. This is when Yoshio Nojima comes into the picture.
The owner of the place is in his sixties, with fine features and large square glasses. He greets you like a regular, then fills your glass with one of those superior rice alcohols, with milky flavors, which taste around 15 degrees. The man now makes his way between the crates of vinyl, turns on an audio amplifier and then bustles over a record player. Meticulously, like a sound engineer, he tests the return of the sound system and measures the volume of a pair of high-fidelity loudspeakers to perfection. You are comfortably seated in the hollow of an armchair when Yoshio Nojima decides to play the first vinyl of the evening: sleep in peace, by Miyako Koda, a piece of Japanese ambient pop released in 1998, both relaxing and enveloping.
Your lips soak in the glass of sake, the breath of a sax caresses your ears, the heady voice of the singer goes to your head and, suddenly, the musical experience is complete. “More than in a bar, I wanted people to have the impression of entering the living room of my apartment. I thought of the place as a refuge cut off from the outside world; as a place where you come to recharge your batteries », explains Yoshio Nojima in a video posted on the YouTube page of Resident Advisor. In 2019, the webzine devoted to the culture of electronic music produced a documentary series devoted to the recent emergence of listening bars – or “listening bars”: these new eating places in which music supplants food to play the role of main course.
Food in the background
Like most cutting-edge culinary trends, listening bars have their origins in Japanese culture – and more precisely in that of the jazz kissa. From the 1950s, the streets of Tokyo were full of these “jazz cafes” entirely designed to satisfy the thirst of music lovers. The concept is simple: jazz kissa are places where you eat on the go and talk little… but where you listen with relish. Not just any music: exclusively jazz standards – and this, at a time when recordings by jazzmen were rare and records by John Coltrane or Albert Ayler, imported from the United States, were considered precious objects. Drink (mainly coffee) or food (most often gyoza ravioli) take second place; what matters here, above all, is the quality of musical listening – which is intended to be optimal in all respects.
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