NYC-based multi-instrumentalist and DJ Takuya Nakamura has become something of a viral sensation over the past couple of years, but behind the widely-shared clips of his jungle sets mixed with live trumpet playing is a lifetime of musicianship and a humble persona that just seems to take it all in his stride.
Here, Ben Hindle meets space_tak in London to chat about his history with music, from prestigious jazz studies and live drum & bass bands to a DJ Mag HQ stream and an unforgettable night at fabric.
Whether you know his real name, his space_tak handle, or simply recognise him as the guy who plays trumpet over jungle music, if you’ve spent any amount of time on social media in the last three years, you’ll have seen Takuya Nakamura in action.
Clips of his shows on New York’s The Lot Radio, along with various other platforms, have gone viral over and over. His improvisational style, where his live trumpet playing can be paired with vinyl, CDJs, Teenage Engineering OP-1s, or other bits of tech like synthesisers (depending on the location) is enrapturing.
His long brassy notes drift over rolling drum & bass, footwork, house and more, bringing a sense of melancholy, awe and newfound depth.
Indeed, when we catch Nakamura, known to most as just Tak, at London’s iconic fabric, it’s like watching him go viral IRL. When he first takes to the stage, Room 1 is the busiest we’ve ever seen.
The crush is intense as, we suspect, some attendees who’ve discovered Tak online aren’t so familiar with club etiquette, relentlessly pouring into the room, despite everyone already being packed in like sardines.
But once it’s eased up slightly and the crowd has enough space to dance, the heaving throng goes wild each and every time he raises his trumpet to his lips. The music is lush, cosmic, almost spiritual, and thankfully due to the club’s no-phones policy, everyone is locked into it right here, in the moment.
Not only playing fabric because he’s hot property, Tak is in town to record music for a new album he’s signed to the club’s label family. At one point, inimitable vocalist Greentea Peng joins him on stage to perform a track they’ve just made together.
Details are limited when we catch up with Tak at his flat earlier in the afternoon, but he suggests it will be something of a continuation of the ‘Pleasure Seekers’ album which he self-released in January.
That collection was a mixture of older, unreleased tracks and new productions, whereas this will all be fresh, but he indicates that the presiding footwork theme will carry across.
Opening with the beautiful ‘Onsen’, a “love song” of sorts, that sees Tak duet with the singer Michiko, the long-player floats through several sparse footwork cuts populated by elegant keys, sprawling pads, and in one case, the stunning vocals of Chiara Noriko.
Interspersing this are dusty downtempo cut ‘Swan’, the garage-y neo-soul title track, with its sweet-as-honey vocal by longtime friend and collaborator Lisa Shaw, two of Tak’s signature trumpet-laced D&B tracks, and swirling, propulsive epic, ‘The Wind Of Haiti’.
It’s a captivating listen, deeply human, and revealing of the decades Tak has spent perfecting his craft, discovering new sounds, and fulfilling his obsessive need to create.
Tak started playing trumpet at a young age. He’d fallen in love with the sound of the instrument through hearing it on the TV and in movies, and his father, a musician, “always had instruments around the house” so it was easy to get involved.
Of course, there was slightly more to it than that. His father found an excellent teacher for Tak. “He was more like a babysitter,” he says. “He was just a really good educator, a good man.
Not like, ‘You have to do this and this’ without telling me why I have to do this.”.
We attempt to dig further into what drew Tak to the trumpet in particular. “I just love the sound,” he enthuses. “It can be very sweet, the trumpet. I liked that part.
More like Chet Baker. I don’t like loud trumpet players.” Admittedly there were some other benefits too. “People like you when you play trumpet in school, so I got a taste for that.”.
Eventually, Tak started listening to jazz; he remembers hearing a Sonny Rollins live show that was played on the radio as a pivotal moment. “I was also growing up with jazz fusion at the time, so it was always like the beats were there, a more modern sound,” he continues.
He progressed with his instrument, and eventually went to study under jazz legend George Russell at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, MA.
When he first moved to the States, he says, “I just wanted to meet my mentor, George Russell. I didn’t have much of a plan, like, ‘the American dream’. I didn’t have none of that.
I just wanted to find out about this guy, how he did his art. I had a big respect for him, but at the same time I realised, ‘Oh, he’s just the same as me, human’.
So that was kind of good — I kept the respect, but didn’t worship him too much.” He describes Russell as “mean”, but then softens the accusation to “strict, straightforward”.
Tak sees the benefit of tough love too. “Now you can’t be mean, you’d get sued... but I think we need it sometimes. It just has to be done right, and it gets done the wrong way so many times, so it’s hard.
It’s like, for example, when I was a kid, if I did something bad in public, and my neighbour [sees me], he doesn’t hit me, but he’d tell me, ‘Maybe this is not good for you’.” In the end, Tak impressed Russell enough with his ability on piano and trumpet that, when he finished his education, he went on tour as part of Russell’s ensemble, the Living Time Orchestra.
Russell’s most famous contribution to the jazz lexicon, the Lydian Chromatic Concept — a highly influential theory on tonal organisation that was utilised by the likes of Miles Davis — is still the basis of how Tak approaches music today.
[Lydian Chromatic Concept] makes it sound difficult, but it’s something to make things simple, in harmony, also rhythmically. It made me free.”.
In the end, he believes it’s a natural occurrence in music, so lots of people use it without even realising. “Too much education sometimes kills people,” he laughs.
Despite this, and other successes such as opening for one of his jazz idols, Sun Ra, Tak sees himself as a “jazz dropout”. He has his reasons though. “There was a little bit of a problem.
It [jazz] was street music, I thought, before I came to the States. And when I got there, it was not anymore. It was classic American music, so there was no freedom.
I knew it was gonna be hard for me to get into this thing, and I didn’t love enough of the main jazz at that time, I thought it was really backwards.” Instead he got involved with the seminal New York acid jazz crew, Giant Step, and began to play their parties.
He recalls going to jungle/drum & bass parties almost every day of the week, and it was during this time he was taught to DJ by his flatmate. But with his live background, it was a band, Nerve, led by Swiss drummer Sergé ‘Jojo’ Mayer, that would be his main outlet.
They performed live, improvised drum & bass every Tuesday for three or four years. “We didn’t have songs then, we were just trying to capture what the DJ does,” he says.
Eventually though, the bubble burst. “It became hard to keep going with jungle/drum & bass. It became the jump-up stuff,” he says, “that was a little bit too much for me.”.
During the ’00s and ’10s — which he describes as an “ice age” for US D&B — he worked on various projects, including a band called Organic Grooves that was inspired by the downtempo cosmic music that had emerged out of Italy in the ’70s.
Other notable projects included a remix for Quincy Jones and working with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. “Being in New York and working in music, if you’re good enough, you get called — ‘Do you wanna do this?’ And sometimes I want to do it,” he says, completely unbothered.
The wheels for his newfound fame and grand return to jungle were set in motion in 2016. One of the directors of The Lot Radio saw Tak playing “sci-fi jazz stuff” at a venue in Brooklyn and asked if he’d like to do a show on the station.
At first he hesitated; he hadn’t DJ’d publicly in a very long time. They asked a few more times though, and eventually Tak relented. Originally he’d play jazz, dub techno and other bits, but over time that evolved, as did the station.
They began uploading shows to YouTube, giving the Lot a global reach.
Around the time of the pandemic, Tak was encouraged by a friend to start playing jungle again. He began to DJ it on the radio, augmenting tracks with his trumpet.
Clips were uploaded to TikTok by the account Wobbly4x4, and the rest is history.
Want more? Find out how Leviticus’ ‘Burial’ brought jungle’s melting pot of influences together here.
Fontes
Informação baseada em material público de DJ Mag, reescrito pela redação ULTRA NOTÍCIAS.
