Why We Named It Session House
General producer: Takashi Ito
When I was agonizing over what to name the small theater we were starting in 1991, what finally emerged was
the word “session.” In the 1960s, when I was a university student, funky jazz by Art Blakey and others was enormously popular, and I too often spent hours in jazz cafés in Shinjuku and elsewhere. Later, through my work at the broadcaster TBS, where I found employment, I met jazz musicians such as trumpeter Itaru Oki (沖至), drummer Tatsuya Nakamura (中村達也) and pianist Fumio Itabashi (板橋文夫), and planned and produced their concerts and radio programs. The term we used then was “jam session.” Even before Session House was founded, we also presented many collaborations between jazz musicians and Naoko Ito or American dancer Nina Dipla (ニーナ・ディプラ).
2006: Jean-Laurent Sasportes (France; ジャン・ローラン・サスポーテス) and Tetsu Saitoh (齋藤徹)
The word “session” means a “gathering”: people coming together and speaking freely with one another. As we prepared to start a theater, I intuitively felt that it was an apt word for a place where artists such as dancers and musicians could gather, freely make sounds, use their voices and dance.
Itaru Oki (沖至) and Ryohei Kondo
The idea of adding “house” after “session” came from the name of the Bauhaus, a school founded in 1919 after the First World War in the eastern German city of Weimar, which provided comprehensive education in art and architecture, including crafts, photography and design. Unfortunately, this school suffered closure by the Nazis in 1933, but it had produced many distinctive artists. That is how I came to combine “house” with “session” and give it the name “Session House.”
Ryohei Kondo and Itaru Oki (沖至)
After the founding, we continued to present many sessions of live music and dance: Fumio Itabashi (板橋文夫) with Yasuyo Omoto; Itaru Oki (沖至), bassist Nobuyoshi Ino (井野信義) and others with Akira Kasai (笠井叡) and Ryohei Kondo; and bassist Tetsu Saitoh (齋藤徹) with Jean Sasportes (ジャン・サスポータス) of the Wuppertal dance company.
