‘Blue Giant’: Where Manga Meets Jazz

Blue Giants are a category of the hottest and most luminous spectral stellar giants. They’re rare as well, burning through their fuel hot and fast moving into the next stage of stellar evolution.

Blue Giant – the manga and the film – derives its name from these bright stars. It’s about a jazz musician pushing the limits of his abilities to the max, burning hot, bright and blue.

Dai Miyamoto, the protagonist of Blue Giant, is one such stellar jazz musician with a dream larger than a blue supergiant star – to become the best jazz musician in the world.

There are a fair amount of music anime/manga. Bocchi the Rock (rock music), K-on! (light music), Nodame Cantabile (classical music) to name a few, so it’s only natural that there’s one centered around jazz; especially since Japan has a very robust and lively jazz scene.

There are very few films made with such a memorable soundtrack, especially in the genre of jazz. Round Midnight (1986) is one such film, starring Dexter Gordon (tenor saxophonist and composer) and featuring a soundtrack by Herbie Hancock. Blue Giant revolves around jazz, featuring a soundtrack composed by Grammy award-winning pianist Hiromi Uehara.

Uehara is a Japanese jazz virtuoso. When she was 14, she performed with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. At 17, she played on stage with Chick Corea in Tokyo. She’s also collaborated with Stanley Clark and Lenny White. She had already signed with the label Telarc before graduating from Berklee College of Music in Boston.

So, one knows right from the get-go that Blue Giant’s soundtrack is going to be nothing short of phenomenal. The label that has brought out the album Blue Giant, Verve, has the world’s largest jazz catalogue.

All the compositions – barring two in the beginning – are specifically made for the film. “Impressions”by John Coltrane (1963) and Sonny Stitt’s “Low Flame” (1962). Sonny Stitt’s tone in “Low Flame” is particularly warm and embracing in the cold, rainy night in a hole-in-the-wall jazz café in Tokyo, Take Two. These two songs set the tone for the music to come. The soundtrack is mainstream jazz and showcases Uehara’s compositional skills. Uehara plays the piano parts for Yukinori Sawabe who Dai encounters in Tokyo, the mecca of jazz in Japan. The two, along with Shunji Tamada, form a trio, JASS, out to conquer the world. Sawabe (like Uehera) composes all of JASS’ pieces – “Samba five,” “N.E.W.,” “New day,” “Count on me,” “We Will,” “FIRST NOTE,” “BLUE GIANT.”All these are remarkable compositions where the drummer (Tamada) pays homage to Art Blakey, the father of hard bop jazz drumming.

Dai’s tenor saxophone has a commanding aggressive sound. He holds your attention and doesn’t let go; such is the power of a Blue Giant. The trio carry off all the tunes without the cushion of a bass. In “We Will,” they play without a piano accompaniment and it’s a duo performance; an intricate rhythm, aggressive drumming and fills, as Dai blisters on. 

Jazz saxophonist Tomoaki Baba plays the tenor sax for Dai in the film. Unlike his on-screen counterpart who’d only started playing the sax from the age of 15, Baba had been playing the sax since the age of 7. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, he’s played with Dayna Stephens, Terri Lyne Carrington, Jamie Cullum and Darren Barrett among others.

Behind the drums of Shunji Tamada on screen is percussionist Shun Ishiwaka, a sought-after sessions musician who not only plays jazz but also other genres of music. He’s collaborated with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jason Moran, the legendary Tony Allen and guitarist John Scofield. This isn’t Ishikawa’s first-time outing in the anime genre; he was on the drums for Sentarō Kawabuchi in Kids on the Slope.

This coming-of-age jazz film — directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa — follows the lives of three musicians in Tokyo. They grow musically from frame to frame, maturing rapidly. The hardships, the setbacks, the unfairness of a world where they are trying to make it in a genre of music that isn’t mainstream and tracks their journey towards playing at Japan’s most prestigious jazz stage – So Blue. So Blue is the fictious equivalent of Tokyo’s jazz club Blue Note.

But despite it being a coming-of-age film, Blue Giant is not overly sentimental. It’s realistic and grounded, which sets it apart. Tamada doesn’t become a master blaster overnight. He starts out clumsy, unable to keep up with his musical partners, and improves steadily over 18 months. Sawabe tells Dai right in the beginning that they can never be a permanent band; each has to go his own way ultimately.

Blue Giant is an underrated film. With minimum characters whose backstories are largely unexplained, most of the flashbacks are seen as montages while the characters perform on stage. This is possibly because the manga is serialized therefore majority of the content was cut and tightened to fit in the runtime of a 120-minute film as opposed to one or two seasons of a show.

It’s very stylishly made with fantastic cinematography. The live scenes really make you feel as if you’re sitting in the audience of a jazz bar in Tokyo watching the performance in real time. The animation also captures the essence of the manga.

Animating musical performances is no walk in the park. To accurately translate the movements one makes while playing an instrument from reality to an animated medium is a mammoth task, there’s a lot to keep track of. Drawing hands is hard enough without drawing them flying over the keys of a piano. Rotoscoping and motion capture are the best ways to portray this true to form. The animation sequences during these scenes are split between traditional hand-drawn 2D animation and 3DGC. They may not fit the run-of-the-mill, cutesy anime aesthetic that anime fans demand from the industry but that doesn’t discredit how well-executed the result is. Besides, this is jazz – chaotic and abstract – the animation reflects this in the best way possible.  

Aside from the performance scenes, the rest of the film do not feature the use of 3D models. It definitely captures the hustle and bustle of Tokyo (by day and night) in a blue palette. Whether it’s the banks of the Nakameguro River with the sakura in full bloom or ducking into a warm jazz café on a rainy night, you are instantly sucked into Tokyo nightlife. Or even simply watching Dai practice on the banks of the Sumida River with the Tokyo Skytree in the background, there are some really iconic shots.

Blue Giant is a film with heart, passion and lots of energy. It has a wide appeal for people who have been listening to jazz since the 60s to those who’ve stumbled their way into the genre. It’s a film where the marriage of anime and jazz is complete.