JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES TOKYO INTERVIEW 1/27

by Fled @ TTT / Tune ouT Tokyo

JAI’s influences from J Dilla to Nujabes

and many more including the Oscar Peterson Trio

A life-changing email from Roc Nation that wasn’t spam

so no disrespect!

JAI’s prediction on Jay-z sampling ‘Late Nights and Heartbreak’

that was heavily sampled for Jay-z’s hit ‘4:44’

Jam sessions with Fabian Yusuke of the Minnesota Voodoo Men

@ Voodoo Studios in Asagaya

Japan inspired to start writing his 1st solo record

after years of collaborations and a surge of prolific ideas

JAI’s final show @ Or Miyashita Park 2F Wednesday 1/31 20:00

live percussion + DJ set / Grateful Fled / A Tune ouT Tokyo Production

**EARLY BIRD TICKETS << ZAIKO >>** **LINK BELO**

Tune ouT Tokyo presents Grammy nominated JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES who is Oxford born and now based in New York City. He travels the world not only for collaborations, but to fuse music from cultures worlds apart. JAI is so inspired by Japan that he landed on her shores to write his 1st solo record.

JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES TOKYO INTERVIEW

:FLED / TUNE OUT TOKYO

Tune ouT Tokyo presents JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES TOKYO INTERVIEW here @ Or Tokyo Miashita Park Complex in Shibuya. Welcome JAI.

JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES:

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and maybe you’re leaving next week?

As far as I’m aware I’m leaving next week. As, yeah, my life is all a little bit last minute, always, which I love. So yeah.

I hear you’re from Oxford, or Bristol was it?

Yeah, I’m from Oxford, but I have an apartment in Bristol.

But, you’re New York City based now?

Yeah, yeah, New York City based.

You’re also a world traveling a professional drummer?

Yes.

Who are the artists that influenced you to make you the musician you are today?

Yeah. I would say some of the most prevalent artists in my life include Bob Dylan, Jimmy Hendrix…those two I kind of see as one in the same right, I think Jimmy Hendrix was a massive lover of Bob Dylan, J Dilla, Jeff Buckley.

Also, the Oscar Peterson Trio, probably my favorite band of all time. When I first heard them, I was like “Oh my God, yeah, Canada’s finest”. Yeah, yeah, those are probably my biggest influences in general. Yeah, things I could listen to forever, forever.

So you had a life-changing experience when you had a phone call from Roc Nation requesting permission for a sample for Jay-z?

So basically I was I was playing with a soul band and we had a show in Paris and we had only just released our album, like literally been out for, like two months or something, and we played the show in Paris and because we were based in England, we just drove to Paris, did the show, slept for like a couple of hours and then drove back. So I was driving back from Paris…having kind of just a bit of a mental journey and I arrived back at the place I was staying. I looked at my phone and I saw an email from Roc Nation.

And at the time I had forgotten like what Roc Nation was. I just sort of because I used to manage a band of theirs, so I used to get like spam emails quite a lot and that’s how it looked like it was written, this is no disrespect, but it was written in such a formal way that my first immediate reaction was, this is like just some email spam because it was like: “Hello, please, may we have your number so we can call you. Thank you, Courtney at Roc Nation”.

And luckily, my friend who I was with at the time, I showed him and he was like dude Roc Nation is Jay-z’s record label, and I was like, “Ah, okay, that’s why I know Roc Nation”. So then I replied to the email saying: “Oh yeah, here’s my number. And then I went to sleep and I woke up about four hours later to an L.A. number calling me so of course I answered, and it was Jay Brown who is the co-owner of Roc Nation and Jay-z’s manager. And he basically just asked, you know: “Is this? You know the band that you manage?” and I said “Yes as a manager, play drums in it”, and he said “Okay cool, we would love to use your song ‘Late Nights and Heartbreak’”.

The band is called Hannah Williams & the Affirmations and he wanted to use the song ‘Late Nights and Heartbreak’ and he said “Oh yeah, Jay-z’s got his last ever album coming out. It’s top secret, but we really want to sample this song” and I said “Yeah, that’s fine, it sounds dope. I’ll put you in touch with our lawyers”, so then I put them in touch with our lawyers and they did their thing and it came about.

But you know what’s crazy about that whole story, which I only remembered like recently, I predicted that was going to happen and I’ve talked about this on a few interviews before about how it happened, but I always forget to mention this fact.

This is the first time I’ll be explaining the fact that I actually predicted that that would happen. When I joined that soul band in 2014, my brother Django who’s an incredible tastemaker, he always knows what’s going to be popular years before it is. We were talking and he was kind of like “Why are you playing soul music? You know, you grew up on like rock and hip hop and stuff” and I was like “I don’t know, man, I just fell into it” and I said “I tell you one thing I do know about this record though, Jay-z’s going to sample it.” I said that in 2014, I said “Jay-z’s going to sample it”.

And in my brain, at the time, I thought they were. I just kind of knew it was going to happen and I thought they were going to sample like one of the drum breaks or whatever. So I didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen. But I knew that Jay-z was going to sample it and I called it. And then three years later it happened.

So hold on a second, so you get a call from Roc Nation, only the lawyer hears the song over the phone, and then the lawyers butt head for three months.

Yeah, they do their thing.

Then all of a sudden you see the 4:44 billboards in cities around the world, and then on top of that, you still haven’t heard the song yep, finally it comes out you have to download Tidal to hear it for the first time.

That’s funny technically yes, but even before that I remember I don’t remember their name, but these two guys had a YouTube channel where they like react to music and they were like up at midnight and they posted, they like listened to that album and posted themselves listening to it in full length like almost just as the album dropped. So when I woke up that the morning it was June 30th, 2017 maybe around then, June 30th…July 1st, I forget, but it was one of those, the mornings of one of those days and this YouTube channel had gone live.

So the first time I heard the song was through someone else’s YouTube channel, watching them react to it because that was the easiest way to get to it. And then afterwards, yeah, I download Tidal and me and all the band, we listened together.

So what was your reaction? What were your thoughts that first time?

I thought it was sick, really cool. やばいね because I was like, I knew that it was going to be a large sample because our label boss had said it’s a huge sample, it’s because usually your sample they’ll 10-12 seconds or whatever the same thing over and over. But our thing they basically like took our song the same structure and then essentially just like underlaid some extra 808 and kicks on top of my drum so that they kind of fused together. And then Jay-z just did his rap on top and then they looped Hannah, the singer, doing the main hook a bunch of times.

But it basically has almost the exact same like ebb and flow as our track. So it was kind of a weird listening experience as a music fan too, knowing both songs because it’s not a cover, but it feels so close to a cover. You know what I mean, so I was like “whoa”, I was proud.

It was a big hit for him…

Huge hit. It was like the song of the summer. Yeah. I think it was nominated for a Grammy and I think did we? I forget if it was that year or I think we lost to like Despacito or something like that, but I was like “Well we were nominated, so yeah”.

So your Grammy nominated. That led to a tour including my country (Canada) the Montreal Jazz Festival, Central Park SummerStage, North Sea Jazz and, of course, your first time performing in Japan at the Blue Note Tokyo in 2018.

So my question to you…did you fall in love with Japan right away?

Definitely, yes, 100 percent. I was kind of already in love with the idea of Japan before, because I’ve grown up playing video games and just kind of like loving it. I very quickly got into Nujabes and a lot of I don’t know a lot of Japanese music. But I had never been here, but I knew I liked the idea of the bright lights of Tokyo and the kind of deep countryside of the rest of Japan. And so when I got here I tried to see as much of it as I could. And a quick side note I found out the results of the Grammy nomination as soon as I landed in Tokyo.

So I always think about that moment of landing in Tokyo for the first time and checking my phone to see whether we won the Grammy or not, which we didn’t. But it was still a good feeling. But yeah, I had a very, very strong affiliation to Japan before I got here because of growing up yeah, playing video games and stuff. And then of course, when I got here, my love with the country started for real.

What has stuck out for you the most about Japanese musical culture?

Fusion. Japan is all about fusion, like as a country Japan is. You know, I haven’t traveled too much in the east of the world as you want to call it, but Japan feels to me very like East and West together and yet I think a lot of my cultural learnings about Japan have been how everything is like together. People kind of want to work together on things and collaborate on things and fuse everything together.

So musically speaking, like culturally speaking, there’s so much fusion going on within like hip hop and within dance music, within jazz, you know, there’s there almost like there are no boundaries with genre. Every time I do a DJ set, everyone, because I’m quite an eclectic person, people always in Japan always say “Yeah, do whatever genre you want”.

You know, the set we did together. I did a million different genres, you know, and people love that here. So that’s one thing I love about Japanese music culture, it’s just fusion, fusion, all over, yeah, amazing.

JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES with TODD TERRY and AFRIKA BABY BAM / NYC / PHOTO COURTESY OF JAI WIDDOWSON-JONES

So the second time you came to Japan was last year for a tour with Africa Baby Bam from the Jungle Brothers in New York City whom you produced as well. This third time around you did a DJ set with Japanese rap legend Robochu. You have a deep hip hop connection here in Japan.

Can you tell us more about it?

Yeah, sure, well again, so when I first started, one of the first albums I got really into was The Shining by J Dilla. And if when you get into J Dilla, it doesn’t take long to get into Nujabes because they’re so similar and they’re often referred to as the pioneers of a certain style of hip hop and from Nujabes, kind of backwards, I kind of started looking into a lot more of like Japanese hip hop and the fusion of.

And when I got here with Afrika (Baby Bam), of course, he’s quite well known because of the Jungle Brothers, so I met a bunch of people from the album we made and just we did some shows together. You know you just network and you meet people. And then because I’m a producer and beat maker myself, of course, it’s very natural for me and rappers and stuff to be like “Oh, yeah, let’s collaborate”. So I’ve just, yeah, just met a bunch of different people from around the the Japanese hip hop scene.

I know I’ve met some of the guys from BAD HOP. I met some of the guys from Gagle, some of these crews, a couple more crews around Tokyo and stuff. And yeah, it’s just like there’s just so many people doing really good things here in Tokyo right now. It feels like a really good time to be collaborating on stuff.

And because I travel a lot. I have sometimes people who want to work with me because they want something that sounds a bit British or something that sounds a bit like New York. Or if I’m in New York or England, they want something that sounds a bit Japanese because I’ve traveled extensively through in all these places. So I find it myself well suited to like collaborate with people and fuse different parts together myself.

And what about crossover have many Japanese artists gone to where you were in New York or in the UK and done collaboration work at all?

I’ve met way more people here in Tokyo that have hung out in New York than I have in like London, say…certainly not Bristol. Bristol’s not a particularly well-known place. It’s quite a chill place. So I haven’t met many people that have kind of hung out there. But a lot of Tokyo people who have kind of been to New York and either found inspiration there or lived there for a while, DJing and collaborating with people.

But I don’t know too many people who are kind of doing the New York-Tokyo thing. You recently interviewed someone who was doing the New York Tokyo thing right!

Alice Iguchi.

Yeah, there you go, yeah, so there are some people like, who are kind of across both sides of the pond. But yeah, because Tokyo and New York is such similar cities. I think it makes sense. You know, if you’re a real city person and you like that lifestyle, I can understand why both New York and Tokyo would suit you.

It’s definitely, I think, a deep appreciation between both cities.

Yeah, especially as in hip hop, Tokyo’s kind of hip hop scene now reminds me of, I wasn’t there, but what I perceived New York’s hip hop scene to be kind of like 15, 10-15 years ago in terms of the thing, the way I hear how the beats sound, where it’s going. Because New York now is kind of on a little bit of a…I don’t know, some of the stuff like Ice Spice, for example, who’s huge in New York. She reminds me a lot of British grime music that I grew up listening to, you know, and I feel like that’s made its way to New York, but it hasn’t made its way over here like in Tokyo.

People are, I don’t know, everyone seems to be kind of quite like, maybe like Nas influenced or a Tribe Called Quest influenced, you know. And so too is kind of bringing its own really nice version of that. Now here in hip hop. Again, I think in terms of beats, right, so what I’m talking, you know, I’m talking about how the beats sound.

It’s important to note. So currently this is your third time in Japan. We met at Koara, it’s actually my longest residency at nine years day for Test Press, it was really a great pleasure to meet you. Of course, you played a classic 2000s hip hop set which was really amazing. Also you played Counter Club, you played an afrohouse set there. You did WREP with the bongos or congos that…

So that was with Africa Baby Bam. We actually, yeah, we premiered last April, I think we did..we just received the master for one of our tracks that we made. So we premiered it at that show. We premiered the instrumental and (Africa Baby) Bam got up on the table and performed it. And then we kind of went into, because he’s eclectic like me, a set that was hip hop. It was little bit dance music, there was some Cumbia in there, I was playing bongos, you know he was rapping, it was great. It’s on Instagram, there’s some videos of it. So yeah WREP was good. Yeah, I’ve done a bunch of DJ sets all over Tokyo.

Including DJ Bar Bridge.

Yeah love that one.

So what was the most memorable set?

Ooohhhh, they’ve all been so good. Meeting you guys at Koara was so fun. I really enjoyed that. And then Counter Club also so many nice people.

I think of all of the sets I’ve done in Tokyo, I’d say WREP is probably the most memorable because it was the first one because up until then we were doing live shows. but that was when we were like, let’s do just a DJ show. And so that was the first one. And I think also at that time I was still a little bit jet lagged. So it was that thing where you just roll into it and it just happens in front of you. It was great.

You also did a jam session with who’s a Fabian Yusuke? The Minnesota Voodoo Men? So how did that come about?

So the Minnesota Voodoo Men are my favorite Japanese band. They’re so, so good.

They’re very similar in style to like the garage rock sounds…do you know the 5.6.7.8’s? They’re featured in Kill Bill, that they’re kind of…I think that even the Minnesota Voodoo Men maybe even released on the same label or something, but they do garage rock, but it’s American, it’s kind of American and a little bit British in its delivery, but it’s also very Japanese in it’s style. They have these really beautifully tailored Japanese suits and some of the lyrics are in Japanese too and they just they just perform with so much like vigor, yeah, I love them. All I could say is you have to go check them out live.

So Fabian Yusuke yeah, Fabian Yusuke is the leader of that band. He’s not the lead singer, but it’s kind of his project and well I was introduced to him because he also played guitar with me and Africa Baby Bam when we did some live shows around Japan last year and so Fabian and I, I call him Yusuke, Yusuke and I worked closely to make the grooves as tight as possible because it’s kind of very different to the garage rock kind of style. It’s more like you know, like following the metronome and making it sure (Afrika Baby) Bam’s got exactly what he needs to perform.

So Fabian Yusuke and I developed a very nice musical connection through that and then just a great friendship and now we’re just best friends collaborating on a bunch of different things.

Any other jam sessions you can tell us about in Japan?

Yeah, yeah, there’s a couple that come to my mind, late night after hours jam sessions in Asagaya where it’s like a mixture of like a few of us will be DJing and then I’ll get out some congos or I know a few people in Koenji and we have like a bit of artistic (scene there), some rockers and kind of a mishmash of like Tokyo, like the rock scene and the hip hop scene, electronic music scene and like painters.

So we’ve had a few late night jams at like 4:00 in the morning in Koenji and Asagaya where we’ve just kind of everyone’s just been collaborating together like that. It’s been dope! And of course, Yusuke’s studio which is called Voodoo Studios in Asagaya, we’ve had a bunch of jam sessions there. We’re actually doing one later tonight.

Nice. So it seems like you’re pretty open doing jam sessions.

If someone were able to contact you, you’d probably be able to do it.

Yeah, just when you’re a drummer, you could jam on anything you know as it as long it, the song requires drums, you can work it out yeah.

So you’d be open doing jam sessions with different people?

Definitely!

There you go Tokyo. I’ll get that. Translated quickly.

What about any dream jam sessions or any dream collaborations in Japan, who comes to mind for that?

Well, I mean, you know, if I could do it, I’d love to, I’m going to butcher the pronunciation, but Shing02 is the rapper that did some stuff with Nujabes and he’s a Japanese rapper, and he did the soundtrack to ‘Samurai Champloo’ I think it’s called. It’s an anime, I think it’s Japanese American anime from back-in-the-day.

Shing02 was the rapper on that and I just think, I really like his delivery style because to me it sounds like the perfect midpoint between like American Boom Bap and like J-Rap. And so I’d love to collaborate with him on some stuff. So if you see this, I got some beats for you Shing02. お願いします！

Yeah, yeah, and I know some people who know him, so maybe we can make it happen.

Do you have any performances remaining between now and let’s say next Tuesday of next week? Or is it just closed recordings?

Yes. I have a closed recording session in Osaka, which we leave for tomorrow. And then it’s kind of just, I think the rest of it just kind of enjoying my last week and a bit in Tokyo, yeah, between now and Tuesday.

But of course we’ll have a goodbye party for you here in Tokyo @ Or Tokyo with JAI himself doing a live performance, as well as DJing and I’ll be his back-up on this one. Right upstairs on the second floor of Or Tokyo. We’ll start at eight and we’ll end it about midnight, so everyone can catch your last train.

Yeah, exactly.

The final question so you are artistic life flows in parallel. So you’re a musician, you’re a drummer, you’re a producer, you’re a DJ, but also you’re heading into a solo career.

You were actually so inspired, so much by Japan, you came this third time to write your first solo record. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, that was so funny, it actually happened by accident. I was in New York and I was working on some stuff, and I wrapped up what I was doing in kind of yet mid-November time in New York and I was like, I’m kind of like, well, what shall I do next? I kind of want to stay on the road a little bit. So then I booked a flight to Tokyo, and when I got here I had a couple of things with some…I want to say clients, but I mean friends of mine around the world, and I kind of had to wrap them up, but things that I could do remotely, my finishing mixes or whatever.

So I finished them and then I just kind of, that was within my first week of being in Japan, and then I kind of let the dust settle in Asagaya and felt so calm. And then I was like again, because I don’t speak Japanese, I kind of…my head was kind of a bit clear, I couldn’t really communicate too much with everyone around me and I was like feeling really positive.

So then I just started picked up a guitar, started writing and then these songs just started coming to me and I was like great. So then I began the slow process of making my first record for me because I’m always making for other people and with other people, and I love that, but of course I have to be quite prolific in order to do that.

So when you’re prolific, you have a lot of ideas. And sometimes you have so many ideas that only one of, say you write four things, only one of them is the right thing for that person. And then you look at the other three, and I’m like “Oh, that one’s good for me”, so I’ve started doing that.

So, yes, I have no idea when it’ll be finished or released, but I have three songs written for me to sing and my voice is terrible, but auto-tune exists so we’re good.

Yeah, but it seems like you’re heading that direction in a very strong way this year.

Yes, see it feels good, I feel really good about it, I can’t wait to eventually share it with people, but I’m also not putting myself under any kind of time pressure because one thing I learned in Japan is like high quality stuff takes time and energy you know. And so I’m trying to take that with me into my own project.

Yeah, I’m sure it’ll take a kind of nature of its own and flow on it’s way.

Yeah perfectly.

Alright that it’s. JAI thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Fled from Tune ouT Tokyo thanks JAI of course, ABI, and the venue here at Or Tokyo.

And once again don’t forget JAI’s farewell party in Tokyo.Yeah, here at Or Tokyo on the second floor. So yeah, come on down and check it out.

Yeah, Wednesday January 31st.

For a live percussion set and a DJ set with JAI himself and yours truly.