"The light is pretty bright here," Sora said. He and his wife agreed that the music was much too dark in mood. "In the beginning, I wanted to have a collection of ambient music - not Brian Eno, but more recent." He came to the restaurant and listened carefully as he ate.
I asked Sakamoto whether the exercise of creating a restaurant playlist was as simple as choosing music he liked. Because your food is as good as the beauty of Katsura Rikyu." (He meant the thousand-year-old palatial villa in Kyoto, built to some degree on the aesthetic principles of imperfections and natural circumstances known as wabi-sabi.) "But the music in your restaurant is like Trump Tower." "Who chose this? Whose decision of mixing this terrible round-up? Let me do it. "I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music," he remembered writing. He went home and composed an e-mail to Odo. I have worked with Brazilians many times. "But at least the Brazilian pop was so bad. "If they have context, maybe," he replied. Some of those things, individually, may be very good, I suggested. "Really bad." What was it? "It was a mixture of terrible Brazilian pop music and some old American folk music," he said, "and some jazz, like Miles Davis." (BGM is also the title of a Yellow Magic Orchestra record from 1981.) He sucked his teeth. "I found their BGM so bad, so bad," Sakamoto said, using the industry term for background music. Odo told me the music had been chosen by the restaurant's management in Japan.) But this restaurant is really something I like, and I respect the chef, Odo." (Hiroki Odo was Kajitsu's third chef and worked there for five years until March. He is not in the habit of complaining when he has a problem with music in public spaces, because it happens so often. (Much of this is detailed in Coda, Stephen Nomura Schible's 2017 film documentary about the musician.) Since the late 1970s, when he was a founding member of the electronic-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, he has composed and produced music for dance floors, concert halls, films, video games, cellphone ringtones, and acts of ecological awareness and political resistance.
He is a hero of cosmopolitan musical curiosity, an early technological adopter in extremis, and a kind of supercollaborator. Sakamoto, 66, is exemplary perhaps not only for his music, but also for his listening, and his understanding of how music can be used and shared. (We were downstairs in Kokage, but the same music was playing upstairs in Kajitsu.) I asked a waiter if the playlist was Sakamoto's. It came from an unpretentious source - a single, wide speaker sitting on a riser about 30cm off the floor, hidden behind a serving table. (A Japanese tea shop, Ippodo, occupies a counter towards the front of the street-level space.)Īs soon as we sat down, the music pinned our attention. It is a split-level operation: On the second floor is Kajitsu, which follows the Zen, vegan principles of Shojin cuisine, and on the ground floor is Kokage, a more casual operation that incorporates meat and fish into the same idea. In February, I went to Sakamoto's favourite restaurant, on 39th Street near Lexington Avenue, with my younger son. I consider thoughtless music in restaurants a problem that has gotten worse over the years, even since the advent of the music-streaming services, which - you'd think - should have made it better. It took me a few weeks to appreciate how radical the story was, if indeed it was true. Few people knew about this, because Sakamoto has no particular desire to publicise it. The chef agreed, and so Sakamoto started making playlists for the restaurant, none of which includes any of his music. Sakamoto suggested that he could take over the job of choosing it, without pay, if only so he could feel more comfortable eating there. The issue was not so much that the music was loud, but that it was thoughtless. Sakamoto, it seems, so likes a particular Japanese restaurant in Murray Hill, and visits it so often, that he finally had to be straight with the chef: He could not bear the music it played for its patrons. NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Last fall, a friend told me a story about Ryuichi Sakamoto, the renowned musician and composer who lives in the West Village.
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