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The Jazz Kissa Owner: Danny de Zayas
Courtesy From the Hip Photo
When we were developing the concept, something we discussed explicitly was that we wanted it to be a place that would be for everyone. You don't have to love jazz to love Kissa Kissa or to feel like this place is for you
—Danny de Zayas
The proprietors of this venture are the husband and wife team Danny de Zayas and Nina Barry who are themselves photographers. They have worked hard and have done plenty of research to make their jazz kissa authentic to the Japanese style. Just maybe this will be the start of jazz kissa flourishing here in the USA.
About Danny de Zayas
Danny de Zayas is a Cuban-American father of two. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, he graduated from New York University and splits his time between Brooklyn and Denver, Colorado. Along with his wife Nina, Danny has run a commercial photography studio, From the Hip Photo, since 2009, and the Brooklyn vinyl jazz bar Kissa Kissa, which they opened at the end of February 2024.All About Jazz: What is a jazz kissa and how did you come to know about them?
Danny de Zaya: Superficially, a jazz kissa is a cafe or bar where jazz music is played on vinyl records.
But the Japanese jazz kissa tradition is very specific. It is centered around two things: the first being jazz music, which has held a special place in the hearts of Japanese listeners since the World War Two era. The love of jazz is what fueled the popularity of the jazz kissa and made them a phenomenon, and by extension a certain culture arose in connection with the reverence toward that music. Ideas about speaking at respectable volumes so that other guests can appreciate the music, for example, were routinely observed within Japanese jazz kissas. Not because the proprietors were being pretentious, but rather because the patrons who congregated there were all invested in a shared experience of enjoying the music that was being played.
Which leads to the second main tenet, which is community and the idea of that shared space. Anyone can sit at home and listen to an album by themselves, so the communal aspect of the kissa is part of its implicit appeal—this idea that we will come together in fellowship to have this experience and be moved by the music together. Record collections can be so oddly personal, can feel like such an extension of who we are. The music we love seems to reveal a deeper truth about our essential selves—and here these jazz kissa invite you to take a seat and explore that vulnerability.
That's why jazz kissa in Japan have almost always been cozy, intimate spaces. They eschew artifice in favor of foregrounding the simple act of listening in community, as though the owner is welcoming the world into their home. That's something I found spellbinding. They have an ineffable charm—there is a beauty inherent to their existence.
I came across the existence and history of Japanese jazz kissas over the past decade, largely thanks to internet research: being part of vinyl jazz communities online, watching videos on YouTube, but also through mail ordering books and in conversation with people in the jazz community.
AAJ: How and why did you decide to open one in Brooklyn?
DdZ: My wife and I met in Brooklyn back in 2003, so it's a place we know and love dearly, with lots of special history to us. But it also boasts an exquisitely fertile legacy when it comes to jazz, particularly during the 1950s and '60s, which is my wheelhouse. One can make an argument for Central Brooklyn even more vital than Manhattan during that era when considering how many luminaries like
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
Wayne Shorter
saxophone1933 - 2023
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
Randy Weston
piano1926 - 2018
As I got deeper into collecting jazz vinyl and learned more about jazz kissa, I kept circling back to this feeling of wishing there was one near me that I could go to. I'd start to have these yearning conversations with my wife, with whom I'd been running a commercial photography studio since 2009. And then at some point, I think we mutually realized that there was something more to this idea. When we committed to pursuing it in earnest, we spent about two years developing the concept, working through the logistics, looking at potential locations.
When the opportunity came up for us to bring our concept to life on Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, it felt destined. I remember entering the address on a map and then plotting all of those old jazz clubs I mentioned. I kept adding others. Tip Top. Baby Grand. Muse. The Cornet. Kissa Kissa was going to be right in the center of where all of these venues had been. We had all these live LPs recorded at these places and now we'd be playing them on speakers, separated by just a few blocks but by sixty years. It was surreal.
AAJ: Is yours very similar to the ones in Japan or are there any major differences?
DdZ: We've tried to stay as true as possible to the spirit of the Japanese jazz kissa. For us, that's meant a constellation of different considerations but chief among them has been: how do we recreate the experience of warmth, coziness, and intimacy of Japanese jazz kissas within our own space. We let that guide our decision-making, from the jazz artist portrait paintings Nina made to hang on the walls to our choice of glassware to the paper on which we print our menus.
We get a lot of feedback from people about how much they love the "vibe," which I think is often a shorthand for a lot of the things we love about jazz kissa culture. Creating a warm, inclusive, welcoming atmosphere. Fostering an ambience that is comfortable and unpretentious. Placing an emphasis on taking genuinely good care of people through personal service. There are a lot of facets to creating that vibe but they all flow back to wanting to recreate the feeling of traditional Japanese jazz kissas.
Obviously, the fulcrum for everything is the LP collection, which is a very straight connection to Japanese jazz kissas. We are steadfast about being 100% jazz. There are lots of vinyl bars who are inspired by jazz kissa and then take that inspiration in different directions, spinning other genres of music, catering to different tastes. I think that's awesome and it would be boring if everyone was inspired to do the exact same thing. But shockingly, nobody outside of Japan has ever done the strict jazz format iteration of a Japanese style jazz kissa, and it's important to us that we maintain that identity.
We've got over 5,000 LPs in our library. Nearly all of them are recordings from the tail end of the bop era in the early 1950s through the mid 1970s. The golden era of Blue Note, Prestige, Contemporary, Riverside. Xanadu, Muse, SteepleChase, Stata-East. Hard bop, post-bop, soul-jazz, west coast, some third-stream, some avant-garde / free stuff, a few hundred vocal jazz LPs to cycle through on lazy Sunday afternoons.
There is a humorously reverent cross-cultural dialogue that has happened, though. You'll go to some jazz kissa in Japan and they'll have like five different kinds of Jim Beam on the backbar in a way that you wouldn't really find in a bar in the States. Why, well because they're paying homage to the country where the music comes from. We're guilty of this, too, where we have these inventive sake cocktails or mixed drinks pulling in yuzu kosho or other Japanese ingredients that you would never find in a typical jazz kissa in Japan. Why, well because we're paying homage to the country where the jazz kissa culture comes from. It's kind of a cute dance, I think, because it's all out of this very genuine love and admiration, not as a caricature.
AAJ: What is your background with jazz? Are you or were you a musician yourself?
DdZ: My most abiding passion in life has always been music. While I can plonk around on a piano and play some chords on a guitar, I've never considered myself a musician.
I view jazz musicians the way little kids think of superheroes. The ability to extemporaneously communicate through an instrument, with passion and articulation, is nothing short of magical to me. Which isn't to say that I think it's simply a gift—I know it comes through tenacity and toil—but when you watch the fruits of that practice unfurl in a performance or hear it on a record there is something transcendental taking place. If I hear
Oscar Peterson
piano1925 - 2007
Pete La Roca
drums1938 - 2012
Maybe in order to compensate, I've done just about everything you can do in music besides be a real musician. I started my first band when I was 12 and began writing music zines when I was in middle school so that I could get free CDs from labels I liked. In high school in the late '90s, I started building music-focused websites to get more CDs. When I was 15, I started DJing vintage Jamaican music in Miami, which I loved. All those studio musicians from that 1960s era in Kingston were graduates of the Alpha Boys' School, which had an incredible music instruction program, and they were all jazz musicians!
Anyhow, during that same stretch, when I was 12 or 13, I filled out a phony name and checked the "Bill Me Later" box on a Columbia House "20 CDs for a penny!" promotion. On the order form, I circled albums from all the names I vaguely knew as being The Big Ones when it came to jazz:
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Two discs of Monk's Live at the It Club in Los Angeles, 1964—the opening piano notes still give me chills. Monk on his own, that dislocated jaunty intro to "Blue Monk," then Rouse and Gales and Riley come crashing in. That'll change your life! And then you pop in "Mingus Ah Um" and forget it—before you know it, you're reading Beneath the Underdog and saving your lunch money so you can buy that copy of Mingus in Europe Volume II that your local record store has for some divine reason.
Incidentally, there was a copy of Bitches Brew in there, too. My first dive into jazz affirmed something that has held true 30 years later: fusion just isn't my thing. That's why basically everything we have on vinyl at the kissa was recorded between the early 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s. Different strokes and all that, it just never did it for me!
When I moved to New York City for college, I started a few DJ nights in the East Village. A typical night would be 10 pm—4 am for free drinks and $10, $20 if I was lucky. For my Saturday night gigs, I'd do more crowd-friendly fare: Northern Soul and Brit-pop at one end of the spectrum, synth-pop and electroclash at the other. I had a weekly Sunday night that was more whatever I wanted to play, which at that time was small label indie-pop and '60s French pop. One Sunday in 2003: "Love Walked In." The woman who turned out to be my wife came by and well, never really left.
Since then, I've done a ton of music journalism and editing, for my own and other sites which (of course) all no longer exist, ran an online music retailer, hosted a music podcast, took on the once in a blue moon DJ gig, and opened a jazz kissa!
But to answer your question: my background with jazz is that I've been listening to it fanatically for three decades with the zeal of a completist, following rabbit hole after rabbit hole. I'm not a collector, oddly enough. I don't have that personality trait and the only thing I can be said to collect are jazz records, but not because I need to have an OG grail or a certain
Rudy Van Gelder
various1924 - 2016
AAJ: Tell me about your custom designed sound system. What kinds of things did you consider when designing it?
DdZ: As much as I know and love the music, I am the first to enthusiastically admit that I'm not an audiophile. However, I knew there would be guests for whom having an audiophile-caliber experience would be an important dimension of their visit.
So, we asked around and a friend from a vinyl pressing plant recommended The Music Room in Erie, Colorado, who turned out to be incredible collaborators. We sent them diagrams and photos of our space with dimensions, spoke about the kind of music we'd be playing and what the goals were in terms of the guest experience. They took that and gave us a very concrete gameplan in terms of equipment ideas, down to specific speaker models, where things should be positioned and angled, and the like.
Then we had an incredible partnership with ModWright Instruments in Amboy, Washington, who custom-built all of the amplifiers and other electronics for the exact system that The Music Room had spec'd out. It would have been easy to go with, say, McIntosh, but we wanted to do something that felt more special and more uniquely "us," and ModWright really delivered. I can't say enough good things about them or the gear that they made for Kissa Kissa. Our entire system is custom built not just for "jazz" in the generic sense, but specifically toward the fact that we exclusively play vinyl and that the jazz we spin comes from this relatively narrow stretch of timeline where even the instrumentation fits a certain profile.
Beyond that, we invested a lot in intentionally-placed soundproofing throughout the kissa. Even though I'm not an audiophile, I think that's all pretty cool, but in the end the important thing is that when you're in the space, the music sounds phenomenal. I thought a lot about what I wanted the first song I played on that system to be. I alighted upon "Ghana," the opening track off
Donald Byrd
trumpet1932 - 2013
Lex Humphries
drumsb.1936
AAJ: What has the reception been like? Is there a certain demographic that are your best customers?
DdZ: I was terrified that there was a reason these places don't exist outside of Japan. That we would put our savings and so much time and love into a project that we thought could be a special third space for the community—a gathering place in the neighborhood that also paid homage to the legacy of jazz musicians and clubs in central Brooklyn—and then nobody would come or that people wouldn't "get" it.
But second only to having our kids, I can honestly say that the reception we have received since we opened nine months ago has been the most humbling, gratifying experience of my life. We feel so fortunate to have had the idea embraced so warmly by the community, by our neighbors, by jazz musicians and by people who have never heard a single blue note alike, by people of all ages and from all backgrounds. And we couldn't have asked for a better team there every day, helping to create warm, memorable experiences for our guests. It's all left us speechless and filled with gratitude.
Demographically, it's really a spectacular mix of guests—that might be the coolest thing about the kissa that we have no control over. It's so exquisitely New York. There will be a couple of twenty-five year olds who've lived in Crown Heights their whole lives at one table. Then the next table might be a couple in their sixties who took the subway over from the Upper East Side to check it out because they love jazz. And they're seated next to a crate digger from East Bushwick who maybe doesn't know too much about jazz but loves those funky
Idris Muhammad
drums1939 - 2014
Bernard Purdie
drumsb.1939
Hopefully people keep coming in and loving their time with us. It's a delight to be able to do this, it really does feel like a dream. I try to soak it all in. Time goes fast. Every record hits that runout groove. But right now, the music sounds so good. I'm so thankful to hear it.
AAJ: Are people necessarily drawn by the jazz music or something else?
DdZ: Some people are 100% there for the jazz. For others, the jazz is 100% incidental. They're there for the cocktails, or the atmosphere, or because they're grabbing dinner down the block in an hour, or because they're popping in on their way home from work. When we were developing the concept, something we discussed explicitly was that we wanted it to be a place that would be for everyone. You don't have to love jazz to love Kissa Kissa or to feel like this place is for you. But if you do love jazz, you will probably feel like this place is just for you [laughs].
AAJ: You sell vinyl as well. How do you get the Japanese pressings?
DdZ: In the course of building our own collection, we've developed a lot of great relationships with individual collectors and stores, both across the country and globally. Most of the Japanese pressings that we sell are sourced directly from Japan.
I curate a fairly large buy from Japan a few times each year. Since I've spent so much time buying records here in the States, I have a pretty good handle on which titles are hard to find domestically or would be interesting to have on our shelves.
Apart from that, my main consideration is being able to re-sell these at a reasonable price. I sort of view it as an outreach initiative, you know? As long as we're covering our costs, the goal is really to get people to take part of this kissa experience home with them and turn them on to starting their own jazz LP collection. Maybe they hear a
Kenny Drew
piano1928 - 1993
AAJ: Do you think jazz kissa might become more popular around the USA?
DdZ: I sure hope so! I've had a few people tell me things like, "I'd love to open a place like this!" and I always tell them the same thing: "Do it!" And I mean it. The world is better for everyone when people share the things they love. Jazz kissa are an opportunity to create spaces for community. They're an opportunity to keep the flame burning for this music we hold so dear. And I think everyone is ready for the permission to slow down and reflect that jazz kissas provide. Sitting with a good drink in your hand and simply listening to a great record can be a powerful act of self-care, right?
Whoever opens the next one, I'd love to be there for them in a spirit of collaboration and support. We're all just borrowing from this incredible culture and tradition that came before us.
AAJ: Who are your favorite jazz artists?
DdZ: [laughs] I love all my children!
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Ornette Coleman
saxophone, alto1930 - 2015
Dexter Gordon
saxophone, tenor1923 - 1990
Johnny Griffin
saxophone, tenor1928 - 2008
Ted Curson
trumpet1935 - 2012
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
Barney Kessel
guitar, electric1923 - 2004
Hank Mobley
saxophone, tenor1930 - 1986
Sonny Stitt
saxophone1924 - 1982
Hampton Hawes
piano1928 - 1977
McCoy Tyner
piano1938 - 2020
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
Joki Freund
b.1926Don Sleet
trumpet1938 - 1986
Hideo Shiraki
drums1933 - 1972
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