Notes

Notes

These are my notes that I wrote when I was thinking about my works.

Proactiveness and Rhythm Switching

What Jazz is

— The text is not primarily about jazz technique. Its real thesis is, Jazz is an ethical, psychological, and existential practice that requires respect, readiness, and the willingness to have one’s self-concept destroyed. Everything else — language, training difficulty, Japan vs abroad, professionalism, DAWs, pedagogy—radiates from this core.

The Economic Value of Groove

This text is not primarily about money.

It is a value-justification document — specifically:

A moral defense of monetizing something sacred without desacralizing it.

In other words, this is not sales copy. It is a counter-accusation aimed at an unspoken critic:

“Why are you charging money for groove?”

The text flips that question back onto the reader and asks:

“How dare you assume groove is free?”

We Can’t Live Without Conflict, But We Can Learn Its Rhythm

Grumbling in Japan

Jazz is the Kotodama of English

To understand English, you must feel its rhythm — and that rhythm lives in jazz. Discover why vocabulary alone can never reveal the emotions behind English, and how Offbeat Counting opens the door to both groove and language.

The Blind Spot in Japanese Perception

There’s a rhythm that Japanese people can’t pick up on. Even though you can discern the pitch when listening to it in isolation, once it’s placed in a certain position, there’s a blind spot in rhythm perception where the very existence of the sound becomes unrecognizable. This is an entirely separate issue from not being able to discern pitch, and it requires dedicated corrective training.

Be Myself

A poem about breaking the boundaries of identity — where self, others, and the world dissolve into a single rhythmic existence. It reveals that the world you perceive is a model inside your mind, and therefore, the world is also you.

The Essence of Jazz Is Rhythm Switching

Jazz isn’t defined by a specific rhythm - its essence is the act of switching rhythms. Rhythm varies, but jazz itself does not. Jazz matters because it reveals the importance of rhythmic transformation; without rhythm switching, it is no longer jazz.

Triple Offbeat-Leading Rhythm

The SNL shopping-skit theme uses a fully offbeat-leading, tail-to-tail rhythmic structure that feels ordinary to Americans but is nearly unrecognizable to Japanese listeners, revealing how deeply linguistic habits shape unconscious rhythmic perception.

GA and AAVE