パイレーツ ラジオ - Episode.2

Nujabes. Intro

We see musicians as legendary figures, people that are larger than life because their ability to touch our hearts across thousands of miles or even hundreds of years and nujabes is one of the most legendary musicians that’s ever lived because he dedicate his life to just one thing creating beautiful music. He was a man who lived and breathed art. His body of work and legacy is a true gift to anyone who comes across it. It touches our hearts no matter who we are or where we come from. His beats were dense and layered and throughout his career he sampled countless genres and create soundscapes that were melancholy and hopeful at the same time. Nujabes mixed jazz in hip-pop in a fresh innovative way despite only release two studio albums during his lifetime he became the godfather of lo-fi hip-pop, a pioneer of a genre that would only gain popularity years after his tragic death.

And at the same time, we don’t know much about nujabes himself. He was a quiet person. He kept to himself and shied away from the public eye partly due to his career taking place before the age of massively interconnected online internet music communities but his mystery is made even deeper from him being Japanese. He lived on the other side of the planet for most his modern-day fans. He barely spoke English and he possibly only ever give one interview during his entire career. So who is nujabes, why is his music so powerful and impactful and how did he create such universally beloved music while barely showing himself to the world.

Like i said not much is known about nujabes’ personal life. He barely give any interviews during his career so most of the information and stories we do have about nujabes come from the different artist he work with in the Japanese under ground scene. Jun Seba, 濑场淳, his real name that would later be reversed into the world nujabes was born on February 7th, 1974 in inner city Tokyo famously on the same day that Jay Dilla another legendary producer was also born. It’s said that he went to university for design. He learned photography as a hobby and at one point the wanted to be a writer. But around the time when he graduated from university in the late ’90s he opened up a record shop called Guinness Records in Shibuya, a section of Tokyo known for culture and nightlife. At the time Shibuya had the highest concentration of record shops in the world thanks to Japan’s thriving music scene in the 90s, but like nujabes himself, very little footage of Guinness Record is available on the internet with only one 3-minute clip of the shop uploaded to YouTube. A friend and longtime collaborator of nujabes named Pace Rock would later tell this story about the atmosphere of nujabes’ record store back in the 90s. He said, Jun’s shop was the undergound hip-pop spot and his store leaned more towards stuff you’d sample, Soul, Jazz, lots of stuff like that 60% underground hip-pop 40% others. Nujabes kept the record store running for the rest of his life and before long it became the exact place where he begin his journey towards being one of the most legendary hip-pop artists ever. Technically nujabe’s first song was a remake of a song from Elmatic, one love by nas.The story goes by that after he made it he put it on vinyl and he sold it as a single in his own store without telling anyone that it is his music. So here’s a quote about the story from an article i found online, “Nujabe did a Nas bootleg of One Love he would then take that press it on the vinyl and throw it in with a Nas bin so when people were looking for music by Nas who was one of the top music at the time they would stumble upon this strange little record and they would think who is Nujabes not knowing it was actually the owner of the store.”

Nas - One Love (Nujabes Remix)

After this first single, Nujabes really dove deeper into music. He was dividing his time between DJ clubs in Shibuya’s night life district, he was releasing a few other singles here and there. And he even produced Japanese exclusive collaborative English language album with an American rapper called Substantial at a time when hardly anyone knew Nujabes at all. And genuinely this is one of the more underatted albums I’ve ever heard in my life. The production is lush. It’s gentle. It’s relaxing. And SUbstantial’s flows are perfect but somehow most of these songs have less than 500 views on Youtube and less than 50 thousands streams on Spotify. Some of my favorite moments on this album include the sunny warmth of the bass on If I Was Your Mic. The airy mixing of the piano on The Love Song. This vibes of this project are incredible and it’s really a shame that it doesn’t have more attention online to this day.

Substantial - If I Was Your Mic

Substantial - The Love Song

Nujabes. Metaphorical Music

But more that anything, Nujabes want to make an album for himself. So he began to working on a project, called Metaphorical Music, that would go on to be one of the main reasons he’s still a legend to this day 20 years later. When Metaphorical Music dropped in 2003, it was a immediate hit and it is not hard to see why. The way that Nujabes was able to blend the natural feel of his music with all the different artists’ that he worked with on this album. It’s one of my favorite jazz-rap albums. It’s definitely one of my favorite instrumental albums. It’s probably one of my favorite albums of all time. Because Nujabes found perfect formula for blending the energy and the rhythm of hip-hop with the beautiful melodies and textures of jazz sounds. And despite its individual parts being relatively simple, the finished product of Metaphorical Music is an album that feels like a trip to a beautiful world, nothing like our own. It’s clear, relaxing. It’s warm and thoughtful to the point of surreal dream like beauty. The more energetic tracks on Metaphorical Music feature various different artists, rapping over jazz samples and boom ap beats pairing with a variety of samples from various genres. The record starts off with Blessing it, a remix of an earlier song with Substantial and Pace Rock and it’s just a beautiful way to start an album. You are immediately hit with the tranquil saxophone melody, jazzy piano chords and a bouncy drumbeat and Substantial and Pace Rockride the beautiful instrumental with unmatched energy and writing.

Nujabes - Blessing It

Lirics like “Deep rooted underground, but on the surface, a tree branching out all I never really wanted to be”, it sets a unique tone for Nujabe’s peaceful musical atmospheres. And the energy continues into the next song, Horn In The Middle, which starts off with a fast bass groove and trumpet melody all samples from Joshua, a jazz standard written by Miles Davis. It’s a song with no vocals but it’s busy enough to keep your attention the whole way through. And Lady Brown is a jazzy love song. It samples a classical guitar riff written by the legendary guitarist, Louise Bonfa, over subtle drums and textured violins and light flutes lower in the mix, creating a peaceful atmosphere. While Syce Star writes loving verses describing his angel of woman.

Nujabes - Horn In The Middle

Nujabes - Lady Brown

Thorough out the metaphorical music, a wide spectrum of emotion can be found in the beats. The track effortlessly switched between mellow, energetic, happy sad melancholy. Nujabes was speaking straight from his heart through these instrumentals. Kumomi is a song with minimal production, just a clean piano melody, a fuzzy drum track, quiet violins deep in the mix and Nujabe’s signature beautiful warm double bass. The Final View samples the iconic jazz song, Love Theme from Spartacus by Yussef Letif, in between a soul singer and free jazz noodling. Next View starts off with a minute long breakbeat drum track over the sound of rushing water before a flute-cymbals-piano chords and another saxophone jump in to create a dense layered track that feels like you’re walking through a forest so thick you can barely see sun. The dark sound contrasts the relatively bright tracks that surround it. A Day by Atmosphere Supreme is another perfectly tranquil jazz song made from just a few different parts. Peaceland, the closing track is full of swirling brass samples that are chopped into tiny pieces swimming through the mix. It’s an absolute masterpiece that goes and goes for over 8 minutes. And of course, the influence of House music persists through the album with songs like Summer Gypsy and Next View, feeling like a Nujabes’ take of 90’s House.

Overall, Metaphorical Music is a masterwork of atmosphere and texture. It combines cool jazz and hip-hop to create a rich emotional soundscape that despite its relative simplicity feels truly colorful and impressive. Even though there isn’t actually that much going on in terms of moving parts on Metaphorical Music, because most of these songs have just a few different tracks chopped and combined together. Every single sound is deeply intentional, even down to the various rap verses. Nujabes would actually sit down with the rappers he was working with and tell them how he wanted the verses to flow, which rhymes he liked or didn’t like. Because he didn’t compromise. He knew how he wanted it done. The end result of Metaphorical Music is almost impossible to put label on with different songs ranging from boombap to jungle to house to jazz. The album sold so fast that the distributor couldn’t keep up. Nujabes went for someone known around clubs and record stores to a huge figure in the Japanese underground. And soon after that, he teamed up with a group of Japanese hip-hop producers to compose the soundtrack for the anime Samurai Champloo, some songs of which would go on to be the most iconic of his entire career.

Nujabes. Samurai Champloo

Now listen, for me personally I am not an anime fan. I’ve never seen this show, but to be honest the impact this soundtrack is undeniably huge. And some of Nujabes’ best work of his career is on this project, including Aruarian Dance, which would go on to become one of Nujabes’ most recognizable, if not the most iconic, composition of his entire career. On paper, nothing about Aruarian Dance is all that different from any other instrumental Nujabes’ track, but the Nujabes touch the beautiful light tranquil atmosphere that he developed throughout his career was so strong on this song, that ended up becoming basically the most famous song he ever made, with tens of millions of views across different remixes, edits and covers on the internet. It’s truly one of Nujabes’ masterpieces and it’s an amazing example of the beauty he was capable of with just a few simple techniques.

Nujabes - Aruarian Dance

The story behind Aruarian Dance is just as fascinating as the song itself with the melody in the composition stretching back over 100 years. The story goes like this, in 1899 a French composer named Maurice Ravel wrote a piece titled Pavane for a Dead Princess and if you skip to 40 seconds into the piece, you can essentially hear the ghost of what would later become our Aruarian Dance.

Maurice Ravel - Pavane for Dead Princess

But we are not there yet, because 40 years later this melody, Pavane for a Dead Princess would be reinterpreted as part of a piece called The Lamp Is Low. In this song the clarinet solo directly quotes the main melody of Pavane for a Dead Princess. And then 30 years after that, in 1969 the legendary Brazilian guitarist Lorendo Almeida who’s often considered the creator of bossanova as a whole did a cover of The Lamp Is Low.

Laurindo Almeida - The Lamp is Low

With Nujabes would later go on to sample 35 years after that for the Samurai Champloo soundtrack. By doing so, he created a song that isn’t just timeless into the sound, but it’s literally timeless with its core components being taken directly from three centuries of music, the late 1800s, the mid 1900s and finally early 2000s. And of course, four countries from separate parts of the world, France America Brazil and Japan. All of that time and space came together to create a track with a feeling like nothing else in the world, literally timeless without relying on nostalgia, completely at ease without being too simple. The vibes are simply perfect. And that’s why our Aruarian Dance might be the song of Nujabes’ career. Mystline is another song Nujabes produced for the Samurai Champloo album that I personally love almost as much as our Aruarian Dance, quiet ambient sound with no drums, the melancholic melopiano melody. It feels like a moonlight night with the wind blowing through trees in a faraway place.

Nujabes - Mystline

So even though Nujabes’ work on the Samurai Champloo soundtrack might just be anime music. It’s also some of his most beautiful iconic work that has come to truly represent the absolute best of his artistry while also introducing countless people to the beauty of hip-hop through an art form, anime that couldn’t be more disconnected from it.

Nujabes. Modal Soul

Nujabes immediately began work on his second album Modal Soul which dropped in 2005. And while Metaphorical Music is beautiful, Modal Soul expands on those themes in every way. Just the first four tracks alone could make a perfect EP but there are still 10 more songs, each of which is full of life the whole way through. Everything Metaphorical Music did well, Modal Soul perfected. Just building and improving on the sounds that were introduced two years earlier, Nujabes himself took it more seriously than anything he’d done before. One of Nujabes’ music managers later explained the mission of Modal Soul by saying this, “at the time Nujabes was very conscious of wanting to turn hip-hop into real music, he was looking to create a kind of musical complexity… he used to say that he wanted to bring hop-hop music to the same level of respect and acclaim as Jazz, Soul, Rock, and Pop music”.

Earlier in the video, I mentioned that Nujabes is often considered one of the fathers of lofi hip-hop. But almost none of the lofi hip-hop you find online nowadays actually sounds like Nujabes. Despite sharing so many of the same ingredients, Nujabes is in a world of his own. Yes it’s true that Nujabes was inspired by the sound of 90s’ boombap and lofi also shares a lot of boombap sounds, but for me personally I feel like a lot of lofi hip-hop uses similar sounds but isn’t really driven by melody in the same way that Nujabes’ work was. It leaves most of the genre pretty boring and unrecognizable. Nujabes’ beats are songs with structure, his music takes you on a journey. It’s not just static effects and super loud kick drums and jazz loops. But he truly reinterpreted everything he sampled in a beautiful way. So Nujabes might be one of the fathers of lofi hip-hop. He’s still the best to ever do it, but I don’t think his music actually classifies as being part of that genre. So don’t come at me if you love lofi hip-hop. I can respect that if that’s your thing and you really like it. But for me it feels wrong to call him a lofi producer when he did a lot to create more meaningfully structured songs with intention and feel in the music and most modern lofi producers do today. But back to Modal Soul, a lot of the jump in quality between the Metaphorical Music and Modal Soul was due to the way that Nujabes used samples in this project. Metaphorical Music was full of jazz and hip-hop samples but Nujabes knew that he couldn’t rely on someone else’s music for very long. Especially, if you wanted to increase his level of recognition he could get for his work. At the time he was also working closely with another Japanese producer named Uyama Hiroto who was already a very talented live musician and he helped Nujabes transition from sampling to live instrumentation. So he started learning the piano and the flute and even began recruiting musicians like Uyama to play certain parts that he couldn’t. He told them I’m going to make my own orchestra and this approach worked massively in his favor. Nujabes gained a huge amount of creative freedom by playing the instruments live instead of relying on finding recordings to sample and because of that, Modal Soul was a much more complex and lively album that anything he had ever made before.

To be continued…