GRAPES KITASANDO

It all began with a single conversation.

"I want to go out on my own." The one who confided this was Takahashi, an old friend of our founder, Takeuchi. A longtime friend was setting out to build a place of his own. There was no reason in the world not to give him a push.

Standing beside a friend and his dream, a company and a shop were born. The company was named GRAPES. Its first shop was GRAPES KITASANDO. That was in the winter of 2015.

What we wanted to create was a single kind of time, yet the most luxurious one imaginable: settling deep into a chair to savor good music with a good drink, slowly. No one rushing you, no need to pretend to be anything you are not. Just a night of surrendering to the sound and tilting your glass.

On the stage, we placed a 1921 Steinway "Model O." A piano that has passed through a hundred years, it sings with all of those years each time a finger touches its keys. There are 50 seats, close enough to catch the musicians' very breath, close enough to take in every note.

The name was borrowed from the grapes of wine.

As the years pass, a grapevine sends its roots ever deeper, through the topsoil and down into entirely different strata below. The nutrients it draws from there lend the fruit complexity, slowly deepening the character of the wine. A young vine has the freedom of youth; an old vine has a quiet depth all its own.

Music, surely, is the same. There is sound that is young and brimming with energy, and sound that bears the rings of the years, rich with a seasoned, knowing astringency. We wanted to be a place that turns none of them away, that embraces them all and grows alongside them. That wish is what we entrusted to the word "grapes."

Our model was SMOKE, the jazz club in New York. But from the very beginning, we never meant this to be a place for jazz alone.

Japan has long taken in cultures arriving from across the sea, unraveled them with its own hands, and grown them into something entirely new. That is this country's supple strength. So on this stage stand jazz, instrumental music, pop and rock alike. There are those who came through auditions and those discovered by music producers; young talents and seasoned players. We wanted a generous place, one with room to embrace any kind of music.

And there is one more thing this place holds dear.

Most live music venues are underground. You push open a heavy door, descend the stairs, and there, at the bottom, the music plays. GRAPES KITASANDO chose the opposite: a glass-fronted ground floor facing the street in Kitasando. When night falls, candlelight and the sound of the piano spill out onto the street.

Rather than shutting music in, we open it up to the city. Someone who happens to be passing by stops for a moment, watches the performance through the glass, and before they know it, opens the door. From that night on, they too become a new fan of this place.

To remain this kind of open live music venue: that is the wish we placed in our very first shop, and it has not changed to this day.