I moved to Madrid, Spain in the middle of spring in 2000. I was sixteen, I’d recently broken my thumb (playing video games, of all things), and I was suddenly transported from Georgia, where I’d lived off and on forever, to another continent where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one.

It was strange. I made friends, thanks to meeting people in the embassy. I went to a school with Americans and Spaniards, too, so adjusting was a daily process. I ended up picking up conversational Spanish pretty quickly — I found Frank Miller’s 300, of all things, in a grocery store and learned Spanish alongside it — so my social life wasn’t too bad. One thing that brought my group of friends together, and kept us together, was music.

We all had slightly different tastes in music. I was hard on my backpacker tip at the time, while secretly making way for music from Georgia. We all liked rap, though, from OutKast to the Kottonmouth Kings. We learned to breakdance together, some of us having better luck than others (read: not me) and went out to rap clubs on weekends. The jam was Kingston, because they played mostly rap and R&B stuff. It wasn’t upscale enough for the girls, I guess, so we’d also go to Capital (Capi), which played different music depending on what floor you were on. (There was another club we’d go to regularly, but I don’t remember the name of it. It played techno, though, and one night I fell asleep on a couch there.)

I met one of my best friends from high school, James, because he wanted to borrow my Jurassic 5 CD and wouldn’t give up when I put him off. Later, when the homey Nick was being honored for something (I forget what–I think we were all acting in a play?) we pulled our shirts off, twisted ’em round our hands, spun them like helicopters, and yelled “Raise up!” Why? ’cause he was from North Carolina. And we all loved this:

It was like that, man. Music was something we listened to, absorbed, and expressed ourselves through, whether via awkward, halting freestyles or turning songs into personal anthems. It felt good. It felt right.

There’s something amazing about music. I went to Spain and one of the first things I heard on the radio was an uncensored Tupac song. I think it was “Letter to the President,” but I’m not 100%. I heard a bunch of Spanish rap. Friends put me onto cats like Frank T and 7 Notas, 7 Colores. I branched out into French and German rap like DJ Tomekk (that one via his GZA collab, “Ich Lebe Fur Hip-Hop”). Today, in 2012, I’ve own a few hundred songs and maybe a dozen albums in languages I don’t speak. Graeme McMillan put me onto Camille, a french singer, and I think Sean Witzke was the guy who showed me Charlotte Gainsbourg first, who sometimes sings in French. But past that, I’ve got Yoko Kanno, Yuji Ohno, The +2s, that one Miho Hatori album she did with a Brazilian guy, a different Miho Hatori album… I’ve got a lot.

I don’t understand a lot of it. But that doesn’t matter. The music just turns me on. It doesn’t matter where it came from or who did it. The only thing that matters is if it knocks. If it’s hot, it’s hot. And if it’s hot — and this is the important bit so pay attention — there’s somebody else out there who likes it, and you can talk to them.

That’s the part that kills me every time. When you meet somebody who is into what you’re into, or knows what you’re into, and you just chop it up for a while. They reveal crazy connections between songs, like how I’m pretty sure that there’s a way you can crossfade from David Bowie’s “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” directly into Saul Williams’s “Black History Month” and have a transcendental moment as you bridge Ziggy Stardust to Niggy Tardust. You trade trivia and lists and you bond. You talk about how the piano (pianoing? piano playing? piano riff?) that opens Kanye West’s “Runaway” is the loneliest thing ever. You can bond over a lot of things, but music seems to be that one thing that works better than anything else. And it’s amazing.

Crunchyroll is streaming Kids on the Slope. Here’s a trailer. Don’t worry about the Japanese text. Just let the visuals and sound wash over you.

I didn’t know a lot about Kids on the Slope before I watched the first episode. I did know that it is based on a josei manga I’ve never read by Yuki Kodama. I knew that Shinichiro Watanabe directed it, and that the show features music production by Yoko Kanno. I know that it takes place in the ’60s in Japan, and features jazz as a major aspect of the setting. I like the director and music producer a lot, mainly due to Cowboy Bebop, so I was already on the hook.

It turns out this show is really good, and uses music in a really familiar and comforting way. Kaoru Nishimi arrives in small town Japan friendless, nervous and depressed. Sentaro Kawabuchi is feared by the other students because he’s a big brawling jerk. Ritsuko Mukae is Sentaro’s childhood friend, and is really the only one who likes him. Kaoru plays classical piano. Sentaro plays jazz and is a killer drummer.

There’s a scene in the first episode where Kaoru watches Sentaro play drums. He covers one ear at first, trying to shut out the noise. Then he pulls his hand down. Then he loosens up. And then he listens. It’s this hugely powerful moment, and you watch this epiphany we’ve all had happen behind his eyes. He tries to play some jazz on piano, almost immediately, and Sentaro is like “Nah son. That’s not jazz. That’s got no swing.” The two characters are set at odds immediately. Kaoru plays classical music and is pretty strait-laced. Sentaro is a big bruiser and plays jazz, so he understands the importance of improvisation. You have to feel the music, rather than replicating it.

Kaoru has to descend into darkness in order to hear the jazz. There’s this tiny room below Ritsuko’s record shop. I like this, because it presents jazz, and the relationships that will undoubtedly follow, as something special. It’s top shelf, rather than just being a regular old thing you trip over.

I think that’s how we all feel about our favorite type of music. Our favorite music is revelatory, whether about the world or ourselves, in addition to being something that you can bounce to. In the case of Kids on the Slope, jazz represents freedom. Freedom from constraints, from conformity, from depression, from anxiety. Freedom to enjoy life. There’s something raw in jazz that Kaoru doesn’t get out of classical music.

I liked this cartoon a lot. The animation has this strange 3D quality to it that makes regular people look a little more exciting than they normally would in such a simple coming of age story. It’s very pretty, but in a very natural way. There’s no glamour in the characters, but the music scenes have this swing to them that I find really attractive. Sentaro is introduced not by face or cool pose, but by how he drums with two sticks on his way to school. His drumming is great, and there’s a palpable difference between his piano playing, which came across as earnest but inexpert, and Kaoru’s, which is talented, but stiff.

I also love the added texture that jazz brings to the series. Jazz is a black art form, or at least it started that way. But Japan is several thousand miles away from the birthplace of jazz. Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue gets a visual shout-out in one scene, lurking behind Kaoru’s head like the most obvious and menacing foreshadowing ever. That’s 1959. Kids on the Slope takes place in summer, 1966. In the US, 1966 was President Johnson sending more American boys off to die for no good reason, The Beatles playing their last live performance, and the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale.

I don’t expect Kids on the Slope to reflect any of that, but there’s such a cross-cultural thing going on (black and American to Japan and Japanese) that it makes considering the context really interesting. I keep a set of black anti-war songs on my iPod, I think the bulk of which were recorded between ’66 and ’72, so that period is one that I’m extremely curious about. I’ve never seen it from this point of view before, and that has an attraction in and of itself.

I don’t know jazz like I know other types of music, and this is going to be an education for me, too. I know the greats or whatever, I guess, but that’s not knowing jazz. That’s just knowing somebody else’s top ten list. The centerpiece for the first episode is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin’.” I wasn’t familiar with it before I watched the show, and they don’t really play the entire thing, but I like it a lot.

I really like the idea of watching Kaoru open up as he dives into jazz. It’s clearly not going to be finished by episode two, and I think the ongoing transformation is going to be fascinating. I’m hooked, basically. It’s intensely relatable, well-written, and the music stuff is, as expected, fantastic. There’s something so nice about discovering something new and finding that it’s not only extremely emotionally resonant, but well done and educational, too. And yeah, it worked: I’m going to start listening to a lot more jazz.

You can see the official site here, or stream it on Crunchyroll.

Let “Moanin'” play while you go about your biz online. It’s nine minutes long, but so good. It sounds like sunshine feels. You can’t help but bop to it.

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Posted in movies, music by david brothers |