Wamono: A Guide to Japan's Jazz, Funk and Rare Groove
There is a moment near the start of Beautiful Bamboo-Flute where a shakuhachi walks into the middle of a jazz big band and holds its ground. The traditional Japanese flute is the breathy five-holed instrument of Zen monks and wandering priests, built for solitude and a slower, more mediative air. The band is Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats, the sharpest brass outfit in Japan at the time. The arrangements, by Masahiko Satoh, takes melodies from folk tunes so well known, a Japanese schoolchild could hum them, and swings them over a fiery soul-jazz rhythm section. On paper it reads like something that shouldn't work, but in reality it does. It sounds like one of the most natural things you could hear.
That album is one striking corner of a much larger sound. The name collectors give the whole of it is wamono.
What wamono means
Wamono (和もの) breaks down simply. Wa means Japanese, mono means thing, so the word lands somewhere near "Japanese thing" or "Japanese stuff". In the art and fashion worlds it means other things again, but among record diggers it refers to vintage Japanese pressings from roughly the late 1960s into the 1980s, across funk, soul, disco, boogie, rare groove and jazz. It is a crate-digger's category rather than a genre with rules, and that is the point of it. The term lets a Fender Rhodes funk workout, a big-band cover of an American standard and a shakuhachi groove all sit in the same box.
It did not come from Western reissue labels. It grew out of Japanese club culture. Since 2012 there has been a monthly Tokyo party called Waradise Garage, its name a nod to New York's Paradise Garage, that plays nothing but wamono, and others followed it. For years Tokyo clubs mostly spun imported records with English lyrics. Wamono nights flipped that, building whole sets from domestic music, which made the dancefloor easier for local crowds to read.
The person who fixed the word in collectors' vocabulary was DJ Yoshizawa Dynamite. In 2015 he and fellow digger Chintam published a guidebook, 和モノ A to Z: Japanese Groove Disc Guide, which reviewed more than 1,400 old dance records. It sold out fast and became a key reference for wamono. Almost everything that followed on vinyl, the compilations and much of the reissue boom, traces back to that book.
What characterises a wamono record
Most wamono is instrumental and built around a groove. The rhythm section is modelled on American funk and soul-jazz: electric piano and clavinet, wah-wah guitar, a fat electric bass and drummers who could hold a hard break. A lot of it carries big-band brass too, a legacy of the dance orchestras that ran Japanese jazz through the 1950s and 60s. Covers of American tunes sit next to originals. Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder", Kool and the Gang's "Funky Stuff" and a fair bit of Herbie Hancock all turn up, reworked.
Two things give the best of it a character of its own. The first is context. This music was made for a Japanese audience, on Japanese labels, and almost none of it was sold abroad, so it developed without much thought for how it might land in New York or London. The second is the gap between the vision and the end result. Japanese players were chasing American funk and soul, and in not landing exactly on it they arrived somewhere else completely. A fraction stiffer in one place, stranger in another. Whether you call that imitation or reinvention is an interesting argument, but the records speak for themselves.
Then there is the strand that could only have come from Japan: players running traditional instruments and repertoire straight through the jazz studio. Shakuhachi, koto, the folk songs known as min'yō, all of it pushed into funk and big-band settings. That is where Beautiful Bamboo-Flute sits, and it is the most distinctive wamono of all, because there is no American template for it.
Wamono and J-Jazz: the same records, two lenses
If you have gone looking for this music you have also run into the term "J-Jazz", and it helps to know how the two relate. They cover much of the same ground, often the exact same records, but they come from different crates and point in different directions.
Wamono is the dancefloor lens. It came out of DJ culture, it favours the groove, and its span runs from jazz-funk through soul, disco and boogie. Its defining projects are Yoshizawa and Chintam's guidebook and the compilations that grew from it.
J-Jazz is the listening lens. The name was pushed into wider use by the British label BBE, whose J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan series began in 2018, compiled by two long-time collectors, Tony Higgins and Mike Peden. Their focus is Japan's modern jazz proper: deep modal playing, spiritual jazz, post-bop and fusion, much of it originally pressed in tiny runs on private and independent labels such as Union, Johnny's Disk and Whynot. They frame the years from about 1969 to 1984 as a golden age, and their companion book runs to more than 500 albums with a foreword from the trumpeter Terumasa Hino.
The overlap is large. Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats and Hozan Yamamoto turn up on a J Jazz volume; Masahiko Satoh and Jiro Inagaki appear on both franchises. The same 1975 session can be a dancefloor weapon to one digger and a deep listen to another. Treat the two as emphases, not walls. If you want the groove, start with wamono. If you want the art-jazz end, start with J-Jazz. Most of the great records answer to both.
How it came back
The reissue wave has a good origin story. Around 2017 two Frenchmen, Maxime Brottes and Gregory Gouty, set up a label called 180g to export Japanese music. Gouty had spent years in Tokyo working at a reissue shop; Brottes was a collector who kept flying over to dig, and the two met Yoshizawa by chance at a Tokyo bar, where the DJ handed over one of his mix CDs. That mix led to a partnership, and the partnership led to the vaults of Nippon Columbia, one of the oldest labels in the country.
They put out the first Wamono A to Z compilation in September 2020, licensed largely from Nippon Columbia, with Light in the Attic handling it in North America. Two more volumes followed inside a year, then a set given over entirely to shakuhachi and koto jazz-funk, and a parallel WaJazz series compiled by Yusuke Ogawa of the Tokyo shop Universounds for the deeper jazz end.
Running alongside all of it, and more directly relevant to the records here, has been Mr Bongo. The UK label has quietly reissued a run of Yamamoto's albums and a good deal of the rest of the canon, licensing the masters and pressing them properly. Between 180g, Light in the Attic, BBE and Mr Bongo, music that spent decades as expensive Japan-only originals is now, for the first time, something you can simply buy.
The key artists and records
A handful of names anchor the field.
Jiro Inagaki was a saxophonist who led a run of bands through the 1960s before settling on Soul Media in 1969. Their Funky Stuff (1975), arranged by keyboardist Hiromasa Suzuki around a low, sharp cover of Kool and the Gang's title track, is the cornerstone Japanese jazz-funk album: all Fender Rhodes, tight horns and dancefloor intent. If you buy one record to understand what wamono means at the groove end, it is this one.
Akira Ishikawa was a drummer and bandleader whose Count Buffalo records pushed further out. African Rock (1972), cut in a Tokyo studio the year before, is a psychedelic Afro-funk session that collectors talk about in the same breath as Fela Kuti and electric-period Miles Davis. It is heavier and stranger than the smoother fusion around it.
Hiromasa Suzuki, who arranged Funky Stuff and played electric piano on African Rock, is the kind of figure the scene is full of: an arranger and keyboard player whose hands are on dozens of the best sessions without his name ever being the one on the cover.
Then the traditional strand. Hozan Yamamoto is a central figure, a shakuhachi master who spent his career placing the instrument inside jazz without letting it descend into a gimmick. He was named a Living National Treasure in 2002. Beautiful Bamboo-Flute is his most approachable wamono record. Jazz Rock, a 1973 date credited to koto players Tadao and Kazue Sawai with drummer Takeshi Inomata, arranger Norio Maeda and Yamamoto, pushes the same idea into breakbeat territory. Kazue Sawai, one of the finest koto players Japan produced and a fearless improviser into her eighties, died in February of this year. The composer Kiyoshi Yamaya worked the same seam, and his mid-70s sides with shakuhachi master Kifu Mitsuhashi and koto player Toshiko Yonekawa were later collected on 180g's Wamono Groove: Shakuhachi & Koto Jazz Funk '76.
Two figures tie the whole thing together. Masahiko Satoh, the arranger of Beautiful Bamboo-Flute, moved between free improvisation, big-band jazz-funk with Inagaki and traditional-instrument fusion with Yamamoto, and turns up across both the wamono and the J-Jazz compilations. And Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats, the big band formed in 1951, is the brass engine behind a surprising number of these records.
Where to start, and why it's here
The compilations and reissues have built a real following over the past decade in Europe, the UK and Japan, but the music still sits at the edges of most local shops.
The way in is obviously 180g's excellent Wamono Series but from there the traditional strand, and all three of Yamamoto's Mr Bongo reissues. Beautiful Bamboo-Flute is the big-band entry point, folk melodies turned to soul jazz. Jazz Rock is the koto-and-breakbeat one. Akuma Ga Kitarite Fue Wo Fuku, or Devil's Flute, is the outlier: Yamamoto's 1979 soundtrack to a Kôsei Saitô mystery film, made with keyboardist Yu Imai. It is closer to cosmic funk, disco and library music. Each costs a fraction of what an original would, which is rather the point. This was never music made to be locked behind collector prices.
