Summer night jazz vol.1

In '80s, when I was a college student, summer was the season of open air jazz festival. Japanese economy was blooming. The big names of jazz came one after another. And the summer jazz festivals were also flourishing all over the country. As you may know, the Japanese economic bubble was exploded before long. So the Jazz festivals were tone down and replaced to rock festivals. I don't know whether the rock festivals have enough popularity or not now.

My musical favorite was started with fusion and crossover, then changed to straight ahead jazz. I went through new age music. And now, I listen ethnic or international music. In my case, traveling around the world and international music were well synchronized each other inside of me. However even now, jazz is still the base of my music. Maybe you can find many jazz related words in this site. I love it so much.

One more, important factor effecting my musical favor later on was the open air jazz festival which was called "Live under the sky". It's held at end of July every year in '80s.
The concert got start in 1977 at Denen Colosseum, Tokyo. Unfortunately, I don't know the dawn of this legendary Jazz festival. So what I know about the Live under the sky is after the festival moved to Open Theater EAST, also in Tokyo. (It's Hollywood bowl style open air theater) Any way it was one of the most famous jazz event in Japan, it's pretty sure.

I take the old pamphlet of the festival. I find various musicians there. It's never categorized in just jazz. The crossover character was a sales point of the Live under the sky. Staring from Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Michael Brecker, Roberta Flack, Bill Laswell, Shankar of India and Samulnori of Korea .... with farther checking out the history of the festival, you can find the name of Jaco Pastorius, Herbbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, Sadao Watanabe and the vossa nova queen Elis Regina. Unfortunately it wasn't released as CD but the concert made many master pieces of live recording.

I remember the performances of the musician at summer night. In the turf section, the young women in short T-shirt were dancing having a whiskey glass and smoking the cigarette. Sometimes we got rain shoals. PA system was struck by lightning. It had a lot of happening the Live under the sky. With these happening the festival had more special atmosphere as an open air session.

Well, I couldn't hear the hard blow of Miles Davis in his later years. But in the hot and muggy summer night when I heard the sound of his mute trumpet from PA, I was so impressed. I clearly remember that even now.