Pit Inn (ピットイン)

Second Pit Inn street entrance
Location	Accord Building B1, Shinjuku 2-12-4, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Type	Nightclub
Genre(s)	Jazz
Opened	24 December 1965
Website
http://www.pit-inn.com/index_e.html

The Pit Inn (ピットイン) is a jazz club in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The original opened in 1965 and was forced by demolition to close in 1992. It re-opened at a different site in Shinjuku later that year. DownBeat wrote in 2019 that the Pit Inn "is almost universally regarded as Japan's most important jazz club".^[1]

First Shinjuku Pit Inn

The first Pit Inn was located in Shinjuku 3-chōme. It was named by its owner, Yoshitake Sato, who was a car enthusiast.^[2] The first manager was Goro Sakai, who had experience of running jazz clubs.^[3] The Pit Inn opened on 24 December 1965,^[2][4] as a jazz coffee shop.^[5] By March of the following year, it was hosting live jazz every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and on other days was being let out to theatre groups and for happenings.^[6] Two years later, it became even more focused on jazz and was in the style of a Greenwich Village hangout.^[5]

From its early days, both domestic and international musicians played at the Pit Inn. In 1968, for instance, The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra played there.^[7] Other activities also took place: a photography exhibition in 1968 was an early example.^[8] Some of the most prominent Japanese jazz musicians played at the club early in their careers. Many continue to play there regularly, including Terumasa Hino, Sadao Watanabe and Yōsuke Yamashita.^[9] Trumpeter Hino played there in 1969.^[10] In 1970, the standard entrance charges were 450 Yen for the 2pm show and 500 Yen for the 7pm one, with one drink included.^[11] It was described as "A comfortably dingy, often smoke-filled niche for the serious jazz fan [...] over the years it had been home to performances and recordings by some of the world's greatest jazz musicians".^[12] In January 1992, it was forced to close, as the building it was part of was being demolished.^[12]

Second Shinjuku Pit Inn

The Pit Inn reopened on 5 July 1992,^[4] at a new location at the edge of Shinjuku 2-chōme.^[12] It continued to offer an afternoon and an evening performance, with the former being for less-well-established musicians.^[9] The fortieth anniversary celebrations featured performances by Hino, Watanabe, Yamashita, Keiko Lee, Otomo Yoshihide, John Zorn and others, playing in a nearby rented hall, as the club was too small to accommodate all the fans.^[9]

Other Pit Inns

There have been other jazz clubs with the same name in other parts of Tokyo and Japan. The Roppongi Pit Inn was open from at least 1978,^{[13][note 1]} and was at Shimei Building B1, Roppongi 3-17-7.^[15] In 2003, it contained wooden pews and chairs, and "ceiling-high speakers angle[d] in to cover the entire audience space with crisp sound resolution and exceptional clarity".^[16] It closed on 26 July 2004.^[14]

Concert recordings

An asterisk (*) indicates that the album was recorded at the Roppongi Pit Inn.

Notes

References

Bibliography