Sakamoto, the playlist written so he could eat in peace

There is a Japanese restaurant off 39th Street in Manhattan where Ryuichi Sakamoto used to eat. He loved the food. He could not stand the music.

Volume was not the problem. The problem was that nobody had chosen it: Brazilian pop, old American folk, some jazz, picked by the company’s management back in Japan. One afternoon he got up and left.

He went home and wrote to the chef, Hiroki Odo. The line he closed with is the reason this story exists at all.

Your food is as good as the beauty of Katsura Rikyu. But the music in your restaurant is like Trump Tower.

In the same message he offered to take the job over, unpaid, purely so that he could sit there in comfort. The chef said yes.

From then on the room’s music was his, put together with the producer Ryu Takahashi. No version of it has ever contained a piece of his own.

It is not playing the music you like

Ratliff asked him straight out whether the job was as simple as choosing records he liked. He said no.

He wanted to start from ambient music, “not Brian Eno, but more recent”. Then he sat in the dining room and listened while he ate.

He and his wife Norika Sora worked out that it was too dark for that particular room: pale walls, the furniture, a lot of light. A piece that is right in headphones can be wrong in there.

Takahashi counted at least five drafts thrown away before the one that stayed. The rejected pieces were too loud, too bright, too jazzy.

The Cage piece that sounded pop to him

The track that stopped the journalist at his table is the first movement of John Cage’s “Four Walls”, in Aki Takahashi’s recording. Solo piano, nothing else moving.

Sakamoto’s comment on it: “It’s so pop. It’s like a radio hit.” Said of a Cage piece from 1944 that sounds like a joke, and it is exactly the rule at work: something in there has to be singable, or the room will not hold it.

Listen while you read

The other three, and what they share

Gavin Bryars’s “My First Homage” runs past fifteen minutes. In a restaurant that is only strange on paper: a long piece asks nobody to follow it, and behaves the way light does.

“Graysmith’s Theme” is David Shire’s, from the score to “Zodiac”. It was written to sit underneath something else, which is the job on offer here.

Roberto Musci’s “Claudia, Wilhelm R and Me” is under three minutes and comes out of 1980s Italy, from an archive of field recordings. It sounds like nothing you would expect to hear over dinner.

The thread is not a genre. It is that none of these pieces asks for its turn.

We left it running for a whole working afternoon, and that is the thing that stays with you: you notice the selection when it stops, not while it plays.

The playlists he had made before

This was not the first time he had chosen music for somebody else, but the earlier ones were for his family.

He made one for his son, who was learning bass, and kept Jaco Pastorius out of it on personal taste. His son found out a week later and told him off.

He made one for his father, ill in hospital. And one for his mother’s funeral. Ratliff asked whether that was music she had loved. Sakamoto paused, laughed and said no: “It was, kind of, my ego.”

Sakamoto died on 28 March 2023, at seventy-one. What is left is the way he treated a speaker in a dining room: as a place where music gets chosen by somebody, instead of being allowed to happen.