Interview: Takuya Nakamura
- Maisy Harnett
- 34 minutes ago
- 9 min read
If you’re looking for a great night out dancing, and you like your music to have some meat to it, Jungle Jazz is the way to go. If it’s talent you want, there’s nowhere better to start than the man himself, Tokyo’s finest, Takuya Nakamura. The Mic's Maisy Harnett reports
11:30pm in the rainy Brickworks carpark smoking area and people are slowly shuffling back down into the basement. Following large colourful paper lanterns through the mass of hot bodies, I sneak my way to the front. On the sight of Nakamura, the crowd erupts and starts to step with the heavy jungle beat; until he picks up the trumpet and its ring pierces right through your chest. Moving little and showing no more than a cheeky smirk, Nakamura knows his music speaks for itself. The room was captivating for the entire set, with waves of faster, stronger beats and longer repetitive soundscapes that kept the energy strong throughout the night. With a young, growing crowd, it is obvious that he has discovered a blend of his talents that resonates with people. Takuya is unassuming, playful and creative, and in his rich musical journey no opportunity has been passed ungrasped. I am sure that what we are witnessing is the assertion of a giant in the global jungle jazz scene. If you don’t know, get to know.
Earlier that day, I was invited down to the soundcheck where I watched him carefully work with the sound engineers to fine tune his setup; this was on his UK tour with Tokio Station, with events in Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester and Liverpool. He was curating trendy, packed, high-energy crowds every night. Takuya was also kind enough to sit down and speak with me: on his career so far, and what might be next.
We cannot begin without mentioning the trumpet, your fans have really seemed to connect with the way you blend it into your DJ sets. How do you decide when to pick it up?
Honestly, I just feel like I should do it. Sometimes a track works with a trumpet and its trumpet time, sometimes it doesn't work and it's better off without. You know, there’s a break section in dance music, so I’d play it instead of just a break, more emotional things, then that leads to something and I stop, it all depends on the beats.
From your project Cosmic Rhythms to your Instagram handle space_tak, where does your love for all things space come from?
Well, there’s a few things. There’s a genre called space jazz, also some of the more, not spiritual, books but something like that where you go out of your mind with space. We do this all the time [he squeezes his hands tight] and I’ve always been more interested in the openness. I’m getting worse sometimes, but I try to be open. It’s not because I’m enlightened, I want to be enlightened. When did I really start using it? I don’t know, the words were always around.
In October, you posted a video of you playing in a rice field with login.jp. How did that video come about?
They’re really young, like college students, kind of international but all with this link to Japan. It used to be that people would just want to get out, but now I think lots of Japanese kids think, oh actually Japan is better, so they tend to come back. (login.jp) They're always looking for a funny place to shoot, and they have this big plan. One of the guys, his uncle, has this rice field, like 1 acre 2 hours from Tokyo and they decide let's do it there- and I just went with them. Anything, any interesting ideas I just go for it.
The set is truly incredible and really is a great example of Nakamura’s work, and the music he plays live at his shows.
You’ve been touring with Tokio Station around the UK, but as a global artist in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, are the UK crowds different from abroad?
I think my crowd is very consistent, it's a different time. Back in the 90s, it was more word of mouth, but this time it's more what you would call viral. The world is changing; we don’t need word of mouth. With the internet crowd it's more spread out over the world, everywhere my fans are the same kind- kind of younger, mix of races. The young people are listening to the jungle from the game, so different from my generation, from me listening to it just from the last guy who did it.
You’re classically trained, moving to Boston to study composition and jazz at the New England Conservatory. How have you ended up in the jungle scene?
Well, I started playing trumpet pretty young, since high school I was playing with a band, or a drum machine or a keyboard so that’s really where it started, experimenting around electric trumpet. The conservatory was more formal training. I wasn't DJing then.
(In Boston) I was really just outside, I was playing a show upstairs and there were Rastafarians doing a soundsystem at a records party in the basement and I heard it. I saw them a few times, sometimes more of a party mix of jungle, but at that time it was really small, only Rastamans. I’m sure there was a scene, but I wasn’t a part of it. A few times I saw it and I thought, this is amazing, but then within a couple of years I came to New York and the UK people were remixing, people like Jamiroquai or Everything But the Girls, and I think what’s this? This sounds similar to something I heard a couple of years prior. Then we started doing a jungle Drum and Bass party in New York. For me this was ’95/’96, but of course there were plenty of other guys doing it too. Not so many Jamaicans in New York, so these were two completely different things, you had what the Jamaicans were doing in Boston, and us (in New York) doing a weekly party.
You’ve released a track Pleasure Seekers from your upcoming album, featuring Lisa Shaw.
Yes Lisa, she was a part of this jungle party in the 90s we were doing, we had this DnB player, me, a trombone player, and her as a regular band. Every Tuesday, from 11 to midnight, 1 to 2, we were jamming completely freestyle. We were very young, so we just went for it. We’re good friends, we had the idea for this song a long time ago, and it just didn’t come out, we just thought this is the time.
But, I just kind of got sucked into it. It was this early mixture of New York acid jazz, house, and these people combined with different musicians: keys, conga drummers, trumpet, so I came after that with a few guys.
With Jojo Mayer, I got sucked into Drum and Bass, and we did this for a good while, a good five or six years, and we just went to every jungle party, we didn’t go to any other party. We kind of hated that other stuff, we grew up with this kind of cult- cult junglists. Then in 2000, the same thing kind of happened in the UK, early 90s Jungle blew up and then... nothing. Completely disappeared. One by one we kind of stopped, for us the band (Nerve) we actually started touring around instead of doing the New York party. Back there, jungle was changing through DnB, and super Hardcore Jump-up and that wasn’t my kind of thing. I was more into reggae, a mix of lots of bass, not so much of an aggressive sound. They took everything out, it was just beats and this floggy bass sound. I didn’t hate it but just going all night was torturous. I liked the fact that (with jungle) jazz and reggae were together, but it pretty much died for a long time. Maybe 2010/12, around the time of techlife people, Juke Bounce people, I started to hear ghetto tech music- ‘oh this is nearly like jungle tempo’. For a long time New York dance music was just house and techno and afro beat and nothing too fresh, so about 6 years ago I didn’t know anybody and I was just doing it by myself, and then I noticed young crowds were doing jungle also, mixing it with Juke, jungle and Bounce together.
What have been some unforgettable venues in your career?
I started playing in California in the 2012 festivals, and I met this one promoter from Santa Cruz, they were like these dead heads, these old burners from the beginning, they started leaving Burning Man now, because it's so corporate. I went twice, I was bummed the first time I missed the whole thing so the second time I stayed the whole time. We’d pick up these interesting Dubstep guys, ill.Gates, Rusko, he’s one of the pioneer Dubstep guys, pick them up, they’d play, then we’d drive off. Just in this whale themed art car, playing the whole night, until 2 in the morning. In general, music is not Burning Man’s strongest thing, at that time it was very aggressive American Dubstep which some people like, but it wasn’t my scene. Listening to that music in the desert, it's just like torture!
The Louvre I performed with CocoRosie (formed by the Casady sisters in 2003, they’re long time collaborators with Nakamura and experiment with music across endless genres.) It was inside this movie theatre, for this experimental film by Robert Wilson, he's a modern experimental playwright, he just died, we used to work with him a lot. He basically just asked the girls to the show. It was pretty funny, it didn’t go how we thought it would go because of improvisation, so it was like a little disaster. It was good, we thought. I think CocoRosie had an amazing time, but that wasn’t any DJ stuff. Since I started doing that myself the last couple of years it's been amazing; San Francisco earlier this year at Grey Area, I didn’t expect how many people showed up, but that was like 1000 people, my crowds growing all the time, so I was very amazed. Last week, with Tokio Station in Bristol, that was really amazing- crowd and set up and sound- everything was perfect. I am looking forward to tonight, the sound's always a little tricky, with a different set up, but I have my headphones so it's fine.
You’ve been a regular on The Lot Radio playing the trumpet and mixing vinyl. Are you interested in incorporating vinyl into your live set?
No, it’s simply because I don’t have a tour manager right now. Also, it's difficult sometimes, depending on the crowd. I mean I like playing vinyl, but it's just a pain. If I had enough, I could, but I really minimise my gear, I have to take everything here for the airplane [he gestures to his tape recorder and his bright yellow trumpet case, plastered with stickers]. Sometimes I show up to a club, and some are so dedicated, and they have a good setup, but sometimes you show up and it just doesn't work. So, right now, I just showed up with a USB, for practical reasons. Once everything’s ready to go to do it that way, I’m open to it. I don’t have too many records, I love the jungle, but I buy jazz records.
I started doing a show in maybe mid 2016, this piano thing, and then The Lot Radio came out, and I thought oh this is interesting, but I didn’t know who to ask, and they found me somehow. Every week, whatever record I was listening to that week, I would bring in. They found me as sort of more sci-fi jazz, free jazz, space jazz kind of DJ, because of this project I was doing. In the beginning, we didn’t know what was going to happen a lot of the days I was kind of experimenting, and it (the Lot Radio) grew up quickly, maybe New York needed it. Before they started streaming every show on YouTube, it was a one time thing. It was maybe a handful of DJs we play every week, at the same time. When I started playing jungle, I was in Japan at the time. Me and my friend Steezo, who is like the OP-1 music kind of guy, said let’s play jungle, and when I came back (to America) it was more popular.
Nakamura still plays on The Lot Radio, this was his slot back in September of this year.
What can we expect next?
The new album is delayed right now because we have to fix the mastering a bit. It’s a bit of a collection, less conceptual than more of the jazzy stuff I’ve done before; it's more of a mixture of different things. The album has lots of vocals, me singing on one song. Whatever I feel like I want to put out, stuff that I made last year, some older stuff that just has to be put out by now and this is the best time for it. The next one I’m probably going to think about a lot and maybe include a drummer.
I’m staying out in London during this tour, but London’s this deep city. Last year, I didn’t know so many people. Right now, all of a sudden, I have good people. I’m going to do this piano solo concert near Deptford, that’s kind of sick, right? I’m also working on some new songs with different producers, I ended up really liking them, we found a formula. I will come back (to the UK), maybe at the end of the year; I became friends with some of the OG guys, we’re kind of the same age. But first, I’m coming back to New York, we’re having this Northwest tour in Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland with currency audio, the drummer. He knows everything about DnB, more than me! It’s going to be live freestyle, for this one, very interesting, we’ll just go for it. We allow the tracks to flow, and we just do improvisation. Next year, the UK tour is going to be more with currencyaudio, and maybe with some more musicians.
Photos courtesy of Maisy Harnett
Edited by Daniela Roux
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