Rhythm King
Club Member Takayuki Maeji shares how a chance meeting at a party reignited his youthful passion for playing music.
Tap. Tap. Tap. When Takayuki Maeji was a kid, he drove his mother crazy with his impromptu drumming performances with his chopsticks on the dinner table.
Inspired by the groups he saw playing on TV, he dreamed of becoming a musician.
“I was born in 1955 and, in the ’60s, there was this boom in Japan called ‘group sounds,’ with bands imitating the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” he explains. “My mom used to say, ‘What are you doing? Don’t make any stupid noise!’”
The Wakayama native picked up a guitar in high school and then drumsticks at 18. When he left his hometown of Tanabe, one of the starting points for the ancient Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail, and came to Tokyo for university, he started playing British rock.
But aspirations of becoming a professional musician petered out.
“I didn’t really touch the drum set for 37 or 38 years,” Maeji says. “Then, four years ago, I was invited to a hanami party by my tennis doubles partner. There, I met a pianist who told me that he had been playing in a small jazz club in Daikanyama called Lezard for the past 10 years. And he asked, ‘Why don’t you come?’”
Maeji was reading The 100-Year Life, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s guide to pursuing a long and fruitful existence, at the time.
“I read this book and I thought, ‘I have 30-something years left. I have to enjoy my life. I have to do something I really love,’” says the 67-year-old. “‘Why don’t I go back to music?’ I thought. So I bought sticks and brushes and I went to the jazz club. The experience was really, really good.”
Since he hadn’t picked up the sticks for about a decade (he had last played at some open mics at Traders’ Bar), the years away from the kit showed. A friend introduced Maeji to Tommy Campbell, an American jazz drummer who had played with the likes of Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie.
“Because he lives in New York and I’m in Tokyo, we did lessons over Zoom,” Maeji explains. “This went on for almost two years. I learned quite a lot.”
Now studying with a local drummer, Maeji takes his rhythms into jazz clubs across Tokyo three or four nights a week. The city, he notes, has become a mecca for amateur jazz musicians, with several hundred jazz clubs like the 30-year-old Lezard hosting gigs and sessions.
The transition to jazz, he says, has been revealing.
“In college, I was playing fusion. You have a really fixed agenda. But when I started playing jazz standards four years ago, I found there’s communication among musicians. You play a note or rhythm, then the other musicians hear that and work off it,” he explains. “Jazz is like communication, and it is very different depending on whom you are playing with. That is really the exciting part of jazz.”
Words: C Bryan Jones
Top Image of Takayuki Maeji: Kayo Yamawaki
