Outside the Lyrics

[music] -When it comes to music, think about your favorite memories.

What did you experience?

Who were you with?

-What lies beneath our relationship with music is our relationship with others.

Music connects us with our communities and with people we may never meet.

-Los Angeles has a long history of music-listening spaces, which are currently experiencing a revival.

All over the city, DJs, record labels, and music lovers come together to introduce and reacquaint the public with new and lesser-known artists.

-Inspired by Japanese kissaten culture, listening events and bars pay tribute to music, and moreover build communities around an appreciation and love for it.

-Today we're hanging out with several of the people who are curating and transforming city spaces into living repositories of memory and sound.

[music] -Yes.

There's a lot.

Public Enemy's first album, first BDP record, Brand Nubian, being Rakim I saw in here.

Yes, these were a lot of my heroes.

-This is Peanut Butter Wolf, musician, producer, and founder of Stones Throw Records, a label that's home to some of the most iconic albums of the last decades.

Stones Throw Records is synonymous with West Coast sounds, featuring artists like co-founder Charizma, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Sudan Archives, and iconic releases like J Dilla's Donuts and MF Doom and Madlib's Madvillainy.

Early memories, how did you get into listening, especially listening to music?

-I had a teacher in second grade.

He was the one that really opened my mind, I guess.

Every Friday we would get to listen to music.

I discovered the Sylvers, the Jacksons, Groove Line.

I started buying my own 45s of a lot of those songs that I was hearing in the class.

-Really, that young?

-Yes, and this record store called Star Records.

This was all in San Jose where I'm from.

-You were the 9-year-old, the 10-year-old who was in the record shop buying records, and- -I was.

-- I guess at that point, building an emerging collection.

-Yes.

They told me, when you're old enough to work, we're going to hire you, and they did.

I met a lot of up-and-coming rappers and artists.

-What did it mean to shift from listening to music and sound for yourself to then curating sound and experiences for others?

-That's all I cared about really at that time.

I was known as the guy with the jams.

People would say that.

Everything I was doing in those days was curation, whether it was doing the mix tapes and stuff and then making tracks with people.

One day I just felt like I know so many talented hip-hop artists in the Bay Area, so I was like, I'm going to start my own label and put these guys out.

-Wolf's multi-thousand vinyl collection is housed in the Gold Line Bar, a listening and event space located in Highland Park.

Goldline opened in 2018 and has become a hub for music spun by an array of DJs who get access to Wolf's vast reservoir of records.

[music] -At first, the concept was more just having people DJ and pick their favorite songs.

Then, I found out that in Japan and other parts of Asia, they actually have listening bars where the owner of the bar, it's their record collection.

I was listening to a DJ spin a mix of all Stevie Wonder music when I was in Japan, and it just hit me so hard.

I just started crying.

-I remember hearing someone describe it to me.

They were saying one of the things that's powerful, going to another place, especially someplace where you might not speak the language, music being a bridge unlike that of many other kinds of forms of culture and creativity.

-Totally happens, yes.

Then, I was like, okay, so this is a concept that can actually happen.

I was so focused on, okay, I want to have DJs every night here.

It's always going to be different music because there's 10,000 records in here.

Then, I started realizing I really enjoy when we do the listening events where it's like an album.

Having this space allows me to really hear songs, discover them that way more.

-Listening spaces like the Gold Line took inspiration from Japanese listening practices.

While American jazz was introduced to Japan in the 1910s, it grew in popularity in the aftermath of World War II.

It was during this time that traditional Japanese cafes became kissatens, more commonly called kissas, cozy coffeehouses and cultural spaces devoted to high-fidelity listening.

-When I started Stones Throw, it was only vinyl.

For me, what's more difficult is to see that most people listen to music, they don't have speakers anymore.

My understanding of the Japanese vinyl bar kissa culture is that you would go to this bar to listen to it on an actual sound system, listen to the whole album.

It would be mostly a lot of jazz import records from the United States that were too expensive for the common person to buy.

They would go to the vinyl bar to do that.

That's almost happening again with bars like mine where people don't have the sound system at their house, and you come here to listen to it, and also to listen to it with other people who care so much about music, who are so passionate about it.

-Jazz kissaten owners are cultural curators of high-quality listening environments.

They're DJs.

Kissas are also a learning space where owners might give in-depth introductions to records before playing them.

Some even request complete silence while listening.

Today, iterations of these listening practices have moved across the Pacific.

Institutions like Los Angeles's Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and In Sheep's Clothing are bringing these practices to new audiences.

In Downtown LA's historic Little Tokyo district, the JCCC hosts a series of listening events in the center's Japanese garden.

They celebrate musical histories and showcase labels that preserve analog music and reissue historic albums from around the world.

While these events aren't jazz kissas in the traditional sense, they take their inspiration from the kissa ethos, creating a public forum where community members can listen and learn together.

[music] -There's a concept in Japan.

There's a principle called shakkei, and it loosely translates to borrowed scenery.

It's this idea that Japanese garden designers, they will be aware of the distant landscapes that surround the garden that they're designing, and they lay out the garden in such a way that incorporates the surrounding landscape into the garden's composition.

What we're trying to do here in the middle of Downtown LA is we encourage people to come into the garden to listen to the music that we're playing, and it's our way of paying ode to that same principle.

There's also this idea of kankyM ongaku, or Japanese environmental music.

It's a genre in Japan of music.

The artists that were creating that music, they created that music with the intention of music designed for a particular space.

Again, we encourage people to come into the garden and listen to the music we're playing, but also be aware of the downtown sounds.

You hear the helicopters, you hear all the trucks.

That's part of our way of enhancing somebody's experience, setting them in the place that they're in, but also experiencing music in a different way.

-This idea of shakkei that you are talking about makes me think a lot about music, this concept of borrowing and borrowing from surroundings, but also borrowing forms of inspiration.

It feels like, musically, we can look to different movements, like hip-hop, for example, where sampling becomes a part of the ethos and the practice of different musical forms.

-Yes, I'm also a DJ.

Part of my practice as a DJ is blending these different genres together.

One, as a way of just activating different communities, but also trying to use music as a vehicle to connect people across genres, across communities, and highlight those intersections in real time.

-For the show this evening, the team at In Sheep's Clothing collaborated with record label Temporal Drift to showcase a collection of Japanese jazz throughout the decades.

The event bridges a long history between Little Tokyo and American jazz.

During World War II, the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans opened housing in Little Tokyo to black migrants who renamed it Bronzeville and turned it into a major hub of West Coast jazz.

Wartime venues, like the Finale Club, helped anchor a thriving swing and bebop scene before Japanese American residents returned in the post-war years.

Showcasing contemporary Japanese jazz in tonight's show continues that cultural exchange across the Pacific.

-Tonight is a release party for a record that we're co-releasing together, Temporal Drift and In Sheep's Clothing.

The selection is all going to be geared around this record.

The concept of the record is very much influenced by Theaster Gates' idea of Afro Mingei, which is connecting the black arts with Japanese folk craft, the same way that they were both oppressed in different ways.

A lot of the selection tonight is just connecting American jazz and Japanese jazz through a bunch of different artists that we've selected over the decades.

There's music from the '60s, the '70s, and a bit of the '80s, and then into this record that we're releasing.

[music] -What do you think about listening in community or listening collectively, whether that's showing up with friends or showing up in a room full of strangers, that changes the listening experience or changes how we hear something that we're engaging with?

-In general, these days, doing things with other people, it becomes rarer and rarer with the digital age and everything, but just creating space to be around others and building community and listening together, I think that's really the crucial part.

-Another way to look at it is that the pinnacle of the listening experience is seeing an act live and hearing an act live.

With these listening bars and listening kissas with their amazing sound systems that can reproduce the sounds as close to a live performance as possible, I think that gives listeners an opportunity to hear a band that doesn't exist anymore.

Then, when you put on the record through these speakers and through this sound system, you can experience the closest that you can ever have to a live experience.

Then, to do that with a group of other people who want to experience the same thing, I think that makes it very special.

-Music is vibration.

It's one of the few mediums that passes through our bodies.

I think the way that we listen in a collective space and we have the same music passing through all our bodies, I believe our actual cells are being affected by the vibrations of sound.

When you're in a communal space listening to the same music with strangers or with friends, there's something special that's happening when we're all being affected by the same vibrations, the ways in which we slowly align over time thanks to the vibrations that are passing through us.

-As Rani points out, listening to music creates new pathways within us and with others.

-It's a route to self-discovery and communal connection.

-Thanks for watching Outside the Lyrics.

-Make sure to like and subscribe if you want more stories about how different communities shape music and how music shapes them.

[music]