Metaphorical Music

On Nujabes, and the music that defined an era (of my college life).

My favorite jazz teacher died the day after my 20th birthday, though I wouldn’t know his work or his name, real or stage, for a couple months more.

Aimlessly stumbling through collegiate life, unguarded and unguided, I sank into the depths of new (to me) music and into the nuance, repetitiveness, and competition of an RTS PC (real-time strategy, computer) game named Starcraft 2. The only comparison I can make for the type of game that Starcraft is would be chess: a repetitive competitive game that has a short list of rules, but a terrifying depth of possibility within those constraints of squares and straight lines. Starcraft is a one-on-one battle, both sides starting with the same resources, both sides trying to out-maneuver, out-smart, out-trick, out-last. Its fast pace and demand of minute attention enraptured me, and I studied and practiced and learned more about playing that game than likely anything in any class I was, or was supposed to be, taking. Amid the terrifying and shameful experience of failing my way through college, I had an outlet for creativity, for focus, for competition, and for (a version of) success.

Backgrounding my experiences, especially in my oasis of gaming, was music. I entered a new phase of listening and interest, consisting mostly of house and electronic music. Deadmau5 was the flavor of choice, painting my consciousness with deep, lush, droning, hyper-focused, hyper-repetitive tracks that almost exclusively used one beats-per-minute rate, making it easy for me to slip into his entire discography and only wake to the world after the 20th track ended. Cinematic and lengthy, his work was perfect for practicing my craft, or for droning through the rest of my waking life. It was this fruitfulness and usefulness of music that I latched onto most, an aide that actually worked to keep me in my seat and keep me moving forward. It didn’t matter what towards.

The “hit” of deadmau5’s early career, and the track that led me to his work – if you can make it through the entire thing, you’ll hear the highs and lows of tempo and mood that are capable in his discography.

Quickly into my Starcraft career came the abundance of other players streaming themselves playing, an invaluable resource of inspiration and an infinite wealth of personal strategy to mimic. And, concurrently, an opportunity to hear new music. Streamers could fill their airwaves with banter, jokes, and insights, they could fill them with silence, or they could fill them with music; tunes that they used to carry out their practice. Everyone had their own preferences and libraries, and the combination of personality and aesthetics would have to be pretty specific to keep me on their pages, but after a couple months of watching, and listening, I started to connect the dots of sonic similarity between all the streams I was watching. Some jazzy, energetic, broad version of hip-hop was cropping up all over the place, a dense and layered sound that both allowed for deep focus and study, and also invited a focus and study of the music itself, and its own sounds. I finally just used the chat function, the real blessing and the real curse of online streaming, to ask a chatty streamer what we had been listening to all this time.

Jun Seba, 瀬葉 淳, born February 7, 1974, was a record store owner, a record label founder, and a DJ, audio engineer, arranger, and composer. He even soundtracked an anime series. In the shadows of a non-public-facing life, and under the stage name Nujabes (a backwards-ing of his own name), Jun created a unique sound, blending hip-hop and jazz with samples from all over the place, no doubt thanks to his affinity for records and collecting and listening. His sound is simple, and his methods and formula straightforward, but it is endlessly euphoric and energizing, while simultaneously never being overly anything: over stimulating, over produced, over repetitive.

As a young twenty-something, my taste in music was still very much changing and very much hungry to devour its impossibly deep history. My minimal training and time spent in music performance had given me a cohort of friends that played and appreciated the classics and the legends, of jazz, hip-hop, soul, and in some instances, prog-rock (different cohort, different stories), and I’d also developed an never-ending internal percussive drive, a finger-tapping heel-pounding rhythm-seeking unconscious. I still can’t help but tap out the drum patterns of whatever's in my ears, much to the chagrin of everyone around me (I’ve gotten better, I swear).

Nujabes took that rhythm seeker and rookie music appreciator and gave him ripe material to research and cultivate. As Nujabes’ popularity grew in the west, details of his samples and his sounds started popping up on message boards, and I started looking for them. He routinely pulled from the names I was familiar with – Davis, Coltrane, Lateef, Baker, Evans – but he wasn’t pulling Kind of Blue or Giant Steps sounds, things that I had heard and was taught in my one college music class; they were deeper cuts, rarer sounds, and frequently snippets that held little significance within their own original tracks. That’s the real value in a good sampler, the ear for bits and pieces among the cacophony of others’ productions that can be a different part of a different song if you just amputate it from its original body. We’re lucky to have a large handful of really talented samplers and producers working today, but Nujabes was the first artist who’s tracklists I really dug into.

Of course he was primarily giving me references to names I’d never heard, and certainly never would hear on my own: J.O.B. Orchestra, The Headhunters, Toquinho, Francis Lai, Kip Hanrahan, Kid Dynamite, John Hicks, literally dozens more. I don’t expect you to know most of these names either, but that’s the beauty of this genre: it can pull anything from anywhere, anywhen, and breathe new, different life into it, and breathe new life into artists we’d never have found ourselves. These samples tell their own unique stories, and frankensteining them together creates layers of storytelling and sonic depth, while also creating new life for itself. I find nearly endless joy and satisfaction and nourishment from highly-referencial work like this.

One of many spoken-word samples from Nujabes discography.

Nujabes shares a style, and an exact day of birth, with western hip-hop producing legend J Dilla, both sparking the fire of lo-fi hip-hop, now youtube’s most popular turn-it-on-while-you’re-studying music genre. If you don’t recognize this kind of video/playlist, you must be out of touch (with the internet, in a good, healthy way):

Back before the pandemic started, when time was nebulous and good, I stumbled over an instagram post that said Shing02, a many-time collaborator and friend of Jun Seba’s, was touring the west coast, and would be playing the cozy basement of the Doug Fir Lounge. Without any context, I got a couple people to join me. Standing on some benches in one of the corners, I got to see this rapper and artist talk through his friendship, his creative collaborations, and his loss of Jun, in a room full of several dozen others who felt the loss, too. It was a small act of collective grieving, and a celebration of life. He played, among many songs, my favorite collection of tracks from the discography, the multi-part ‘Love sic.’ series, featuring some of Nujabes most playful production and the punchy, patterned performance of Shing02’s lyrics.

Nujabes and J Dilla both died too young. Both leave large legacies, huge influences, enormous impacts; on music, on the idea of genre, on kids like me. Jun Seba feels like a core part of a core part of me, a guiding light of some of my darkest times. I feel his work in my bones, in my DNA. I move a step closer to a new version of myself every day, and I move a step farther from that kid in college every day. But I try to keep him close, and stay in touch, in the celebration of what we both miss, and what we both love. In this music, me and that college kid, and the young man that made the music, all exist together, trapped in a moment, for a couple of moments. I’ve never enjoyed being trapped so much.

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Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll share some guiding lights from your younger years, because I know we’ve all got them. I made a playlist on Spotify, containing each sample I could find for each song on Nujabes’ three official records. I know there are more samples, and I know a lot of them aren’t available on Spotify. But a lot of them were. You can listen to it here.

TTFN,

B