Experiences / Night
Jazz, in a jazz kissa and a club
ジャズ喫茶とジャズクラブ じゃずきっさとじゃずくらぶ
Late night · Local life · Art · Quiet
The jazz kissaten is a Japanese invention: a coffee house with a wall of records, enormous speakers and a rule about not talking, where the owner plays what he likes at the volume he likes and you sit with a coffee for two hours. A few survive in Shibuya, Shinjuku and Kanda. Then the clubs — the Blue Note in Aoyama for international names, Shinjuku Pit Inn for the Japanese scene since 1965, small rooms in Roppongi and Kichijoji — where the second set starts at nine.
- How to arrange it
- Kissa need no booking and prefer silence; clubs book online, and the Pit Inn's afternoon sets are cheap and excellent.
- Price band
- ¥¥
- Allow
- 150 min
Where to book it
Aoyama & Omotesando
Blue Note Tokyo
ブルーノート東京
¥¥¥¥ · 120 min · English: yes
Blue Note Tokyo, opened in 1988 as the first overseas branch of New York's Blue Note, remains Japan's premier venue for touring international and top Japanese jazz acts in a proper dinner-and-show format. It is the Aoyama area's benchmark jazz club rather than a listening-bar imitation.
Marunouchi & Tokyo Station
Cotton Club Tokyo
コットンクラブ東京
¥¥¥ · 120 min · English: no
A dinner-and-live-music room in a Marunouchi office tower named after Harlem's original Cotton Club, booking touring jazz and soul acts rather than running a jukebox jazz-kissa format. It suits visitors who want a proper table, food and drink service, and a set-length live show near Tokyo Station.
Shinjuku
Shinjuku Pit Inn
新宿ピットイン
¥¥ · 120 min · English: yes
Opened in 1965, this is one of Tokyo's oldest dedicated jazz live houses rather than a coffee-shop-style jazz kissa, still running two sets a day with a rotating lineup of Japanese and touring musicians. Its Shinjuku-sanchome basement room has kept its original small-venue, close-to-the-stage format for six decades.
Named operators, each verified against its official site. We list the booking route and whether English is spoken; hours and prices live on the official site. All operators
Places
Live music in Shibuya渋谷のライブハウス
From a two-hundred-capacity basement to WWW's former cinema — the small rooms where Japanese bands are found first.
180 min · Shibuya, Hachiko exit, all within 10 minutes
Golden Gaiゴールデン街
Six alleys, two hundred bars, eight seats each — the writers' and film-makers' drinking quarter that outlived every redevelopment.
120 min · Shinjuku-sanchome (Marunouchi / Fukutoshin / Shinjuku lines), exit E1, 5 minutes