Ridgeliners —

Hello! It’s been a while. I’m still Craig Mod and this is still Ridgeline. I finished the big jazz kissa tour and then immediately set off on a 13 day / 14 night 300km+ walk across northern England. A kind of “vacation” — ha ha! It was great. More on that later. But for posterity I wanted to post here the thank you note(s) I sent to subscribers of BASIE!BOP!JAMAICA!

The tour is done! Thank you all for subscribing and following along. I think this has been the most physically + mentally demanding pop-up I’ve done yet. Mainly because of all the intense one-on-one interviewing, but also because … SO MANY WORDS.

The archives for BASIE!BOP!JAMAICA! are available to SPECIAL PROJECTS members. If you’re not a member, you can join here: https://craigmod.com/membership/. SP memberships are how I fund and am able to do these kinds of projects, these pop-ups. Since 2019 I have been fully supported by memberships and book and print sales (each year I publish an extensive writeup for how that year went, and how running the membership program felt, archived here: craigmod.com/essays). I am in awe of and am grateful for this setup, and try to show my gratitude by throwing myself fully into projects like B!B!J!. For those who liked all this … jazz … and thought, Hmm I’d like to contribute something. The two best options are:

• Join SP
• Buy a book

The member archives for B!B!J! look like this:

Stats

That was quite a big project (but if you can believe it, I’ve done much bigger ones — 30 days of stuff like this (more walking, less talking though) in 2021 for both Nightingale and Tiny Barber). Here’s how it breaks down:

• 16 days
• ~35,000 words (!!!) published to the BASIE!BOP!JAMAICA! list
• 12 cities
• 19 jazz kissa
• 15 binaural videos
• ~20 cigarettes
• Too many coffees
• A few surly sparkling waters
• The most expensive Daiwa Roynet stay ever (¥33,000 on a Saturday night in Yamagata)

The Kissa

Here are all the jazz kissa I visited:

1. Mingus — Fukushima, Fukushima
2. Blue Note – Yonezawa, Yamagata
3. Octet — Yamagata, Yamagata
4. Pablo — Natori, Miyagi
5. Count — Sendai, Miyagi
6. Basie — Ichinoseki, Iwate
7. Dante — Morioka, Iwate
8. Pannonica — Morioka, Iwate
9. Bar S — Morioka, Iwate
10. Rondo — Akita, Akita
11. Suga — Hirosaki, Aomori
12. Blue Note (randomly closed) — Aomori, Aomori
13. Jazztime Disk (shut down in 2022) — Aomori, Aomori
14. Bop — Hakodate, Hokkaido
15. Leaf — Hakodate, Hokkaido
16. Jamaica — Sapporo, Hokkaido
17. NEL/D Coffee Club — Sapporo, Hokkaido
18. Slowboat — Sapporo, Hokkaido

The Videos

I tried to shoot a little binaural 4k video at each shop.

Here’s a playlist of them all:

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgKA2YbcSq1WW-cZNvKUN4yRkDypUCpeq

The Music

Here my own incomplete list of albums from the tour. I used ChatGPT to help compile this, so there may be some hallucinated players. You can find a lot of these albums on Apple Music / Spotify. Many of you made playlists. Michael Saltzman’s Spotify playlist looks to be the most accurate / complete. Thank you Michael for sending that in! And Daniel Ferreira copied the playlist into Apple Music. Thank you!

Reader Adam Chapman also very generously compiled most of the albums / tracks I mentioned into a giant Notion page. You can see it online here. It’s more comprehensive than my list below.

Thanks

It has been a delight / honor / bundle of surprises running this pop-up newsletter. To meet all these incredible humans, hear their stories (I became in many cases, I believe, their first therapist), and share them with you. These pop-ups are bizarrely life-affirming projects and your being out there helps make it possible. Thank you. And thanks especially for all the kind words and support along the way. You’re gracious folks and I’m lucky to have you as readers.

Now, I’m writing from somewhere in the north of England, [Ed: This ‘graph was written a few weeks ago; I’m now writing from London] just on the coast, about to embark on a 200 mile walk with a friend as a way of “recovering” from the intensity of the pop-up. I’ll be mainly offline, jazz mainly in the head, coffee mainly carried in a tumbler on my backpack. Not a single bowl of soba. No pizza toast. But lots of homemade granola and more fried fish than a reasonable man should eat.

Until next time,
C