Jazzy

In a silken excitement, the geisha padded swiftly into the banquet hall of an exclusive Tokyo restaurant. Some bore samisens; others struck the classical attitudes of a geisha dance on the soft straw mats. Suddenly the samisens began beating it out eight to the bar and one of the girls let go a gully-low bellow that crackled the paper walls. The girls were doing the Samisen Boogie, a red-hot indication of what people meant last week when they said that Japan was jazzu-crazy.

From Osaka and Kobe to Tokyo, up & down the Ginza (Tokyo's Broadway) and through the Shinjuku (Tokyo's Montmartre), half-educated trumpets got in their licks, and demi-lingual cries, Tokyo boogie-woogie, rhythm uki-uki, Kokoro zuki-zuki, waku-waku, jarred the night. Pickup bands were a yen a dozen, and most Japanese seemed to have the yen. They liked it blue, hot, and syrup-sweet, and called it all jazzu.

Up with Eels. The jazzu wave first rolled over Japan after the 1923 earthquake, when many Americans were there to aid in relief and reconstruction. It receded when the militarists took power, but began to rise again after the war. Dumpy little Noriko Awae, who sings the blues several shades lighter than her U.S. sisters, was soon a national figure. Yet in the last two years the blues have faded somewhat behind a blaze of boogie.

The man who lit the blaze is Ryoichi Hattori, 43, a jolly, wavey-haired fellow whom many Japanese jazz composers call sensei (teacher). Hattori teaches chiefly by object lesson: he has written more than 2,000 songs, many of them smash hits. Last week his Aoi Sammyaku (Blue Mountains) headed the Japanese radio hit parade.

The son of a fishmonger, Hattori grew up in brawling Osaka, the New Orleans of jazzu. At 16, he landed with a boy's band employed by a rich eel merchant to drum up business. By 1925, Hattori was so expert on flute and oboe that the Osaka Symphony Orchestra hired him. But jazz looked more profitable, and Hattori quit the symphony to organize the most famous of early Jap jazzbands, "Hattori and His Manila Red-Hot Stompers."

Down with the Green-Blues. One day in 1947, Hattori saw some Japanese couples trying to jitterbug to the slow, sickly sort of green-blues which most Jap jazz-composers were turning out. He decided "to break away from kurai ongaku [dark music]," wrote Tokyo Boogie-Woogie. It hit, and boogie began to beat all over Japan.

One hit, however, does not mean much to a Jap songwriter. Because of a record shortage and slow sheet-music sales, Hattori makes only about 7,000 yen ($16.66) a song. Last month he wrote 20, including several for his movie biography, Eternal Enthusiasm.

Hattori sometimes writes his own lyrics, but often leaves the chore to others, who have that strange poetic touch which knocks the Japanese for a loop, but leaves a Westerner vaguely feeling as if someone has been beating him over the head with a chrysanthemum petal. The lyrics to Hattori's hit of the week, Aoi Sammyaku:

Farewell, old clothing,

Farewell to lonely dreams.

Off to the blue mountains and the rose-colored skies . . .

On her longed-for journey, the birds sing.

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