Every jazz musician has their own unique journey from student to professional, but few can match the unusual path that pianist Senri Oe has taken. Born and raised in Japan and trained as a classical musician, Oe became a pop star in his native country as a singer, songwriter and pianist in the genre of J-Pop, which although not as insanely popular as K-Pop, nonetheless has a large audience, many times larger than jazz’s. However, a lifelong Oe found himself drawn to more improvisational music, and in his middle age transitioned into becoming a full-time jazz pianist. In the latest phase of his career, Oe has released eight jazz albums, most recently Class of 88 which revisits some of his Jpop hits reimagined as springboards for jazz improvisation. One jazz industry professional described his music as Bill Evans meets Burt Bacharach, which is an apt description given his preference for melody. That blend developed over a long time, much of it spent as a pop idol.
Like many a professional pianist, Oe was introduced to the instrument shortly after walking. His parents had given him a tiny red piano on which as a toddler he would plunk on a single key over and over. It wasn’t until he was in kindergarten that he realized that there was something more to the instrument. “I found a friend in kindergarten who could play piano very well,” Oe explains. “And she also had a grand piano at her place and every time I stopped by her place, we’d do a duo. One day I confessed to my parents about my playing tis piano and I begged them, ‘Please give me a piano, real piano.” He even drew a picture of a piano in his window between all the begging. Eventually, his parents realized the interest was serious and bought him a second-hand Yamaha piano.
As a youth, he received classical training but as he grew older, he found himself playing at dances and social events, even writing some original music, as well as playing some jazz. At the time when he could have continued his formal music education into a college or conservatory, he was told by a mentor that he’d be better off playing in a band and creating original music. It was disappointing, yet inspiring news. Paying his dues in little clubs, he found himself playing his original music in a little club for what he describes as an audience of one. It turned out that the audience worked with Epic/Sony and he asked Oe if he would be interested in becoming a solo artist as a singer-songwriter. Oe wasn’t particularly sure the offer was real, until he got a call from a producer who told Oe he was ready to record him for the label and asked him to come to Tokyo. He asked Oe, who lived in Osaka, if he had money for the plane trip. Of course, he really didn’t, so the producer sent him a one-way ticket. So began in 1983 his career of recording and performing pop music in the Japanese market.
He was not an overnight success. “Even though I was trained a little bit, I failed a lot,” Oe recalls. “Every day that happened, but the audience also loved to see me growing up, climbing on to the pinnacle.” Indeed, he did reach a pinnacle. After debuting on STV Radio’s Sunday Jumbo Special in 1983, Oe went on to release 45 hit singles and nearly 20 albums, more than half of which won the prestigious Japanese Gold Disc Award. He also wrote songs for more than 30 J-Pop artists and he hosted a talk show on Japan’s national broadcasting network, NHK. Oe says that we shouldn’t confuse his music with that of the boy bands now so common in pop music. “The boy groups world and my singer songwriter world are a little different because I have to create everything by myself including singing, the song list, the scenery on the stage. I am the producer.”
Oe was in his forties when he decided to make a real change in his career and musical direction. He’d been a passionate jazz fan for a long time. “I found jazz music when I was 15—Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans,” he explains. “They all totally stuck with me because what was going on inside of jazz music was totally different for me from what I listened to before. After that I got a chance to be a singer songwriter and I just, okay, jazz will have to wait.” For the more than 25 years as he made his way in the J-Pop world, he continued to adore jazz and started to mix in jazz with his original music. At the age of 47, he looked into more formal study of jazz and found the esteemed New School jazz program online. He got some help from a mentor and friend who played jazz bass and sent off his application and audition tape. He says that when he found out he was accepted, he was like a little kid. A 47-year-old kid who would soon be studying jazz with 20-somethings.
Oe would come to New York and study with a succession of incredible jazz musicians, including Junior Mance, Aaron Goldberg, Reggie Workman and Chico Hamilton. Breaking into the competitive NYC jazz scene was not easy. After all, his entry came some 30 or more years after most jazz artists. However, Oe was no stranger to the recording process (and record labels) and he released his first jazz album, the appropriately titled Boys Mature Slow, in 2012. From the start, Oe drew upon not only his love of his jazz heroes Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, but also his affinity for melodies requisite for pop music but rarely heard in modern jazz. He released six more albums rich with accessible melodies, though he doesn’t call it Smooth Jazz. “I don't like that, but if you feel it’s Smooth Jazz, that might be your entrance to come inside of my music. That might be great. You can peel back my musical skin and experience my real music.”
For his most recent album Class of ‘88, Oe decided to revisit music from one of his most successful albums, 1234, which won Album of the Year in the Gold Disc Awards in Japan. There was more than sentimental value in that decision, largely because of the politics of the late ‘80s. “A lot of things happened at the end of the Cold War that seem very similar to what’s happening in 2023,” he says. “So I thought about my history and wrote some brand new tunes, and I tried to combine and mix them up to see if I could make great chemistry happen.” In addition to the covers of his past pop hits, the new album features three new compositions, the Monk-influenced ballad “Poetic Justice,” the Brazilian styled “Lauro De Freitas,” and “Class Notes,” which serves as the album’s theme song, steeped in nostalgia.
For the re-arranging of his old songs, Oe says that he wanted to keep the melody that gave those compositions their identity. “The challenge I kept in my mind when arranging these songs was not to change the original melody or chord progression,” Oe explains. “Japanese listeners will instantly recognize the original songs in my new jazz world. So the biggest changes I made were in the meters and polyphonic approach.” Indeed, he’s tested that with appearances in Japan playing jazz for fans, old and new, most recently at a concert at a large theater there. His co-producer told Oe that he sat near a fan in this forties who was a little taken aback when he realized that Oe would only be playing piano, not singing. “Maybe he might sing one or two tunes. He used to be a singer.” And afterward, “Oh my God, he just played piano, but we loved it.”
No surprise, since the singer of the past and the pianist of the present are in fact one and the same. “My pop tunes and my jazz tunes were all written by Senri Oe,” he says proudly. “I imagined myself throwing a ball over the net from the jazz side to the pop side. It was great to reopen my ‘80s treasure box.” Oe says that regardless of any commercial pressure, he’s not going to transition back to pop music, not just because he’s aged out. “I'm a Jazz lover, and I would like to be a jazz cat until the end of my life, so I'm going to devote my whole my life to jazz music.”
