Blue Giant

Shenmue understands the inherent arrogance of its protagonist Ryo Suzuki’s quest — in brief moments, tucked away behind a web of other cascading events, it shows the perspective of those left behind by his decisions, who seek to pull him back from the brink of revenge. These perspectives only appear in glimpses due to the weight that Suzuki exerts as the playable character, however. Shenmue’s exploration of minutiae trawls these people’s schedules yet closes them off from Suzuki; the attention to detail only glances beyond human bodies moving with purpose on a map, to canned conversations and little of the world interaction that Suzuki feasts upon. Thus, the ultimate perspective is warped around Suzuki’s quest playing out in your hands, justifying his arrogance. Blue Giant sows the same field — a man on the cusp of adulthood throwing himself towards passion in a foreign city — but it has a far keener eye for the engine that powers such arrogance, that both fuels it and harvests it, those who gain confidence from it and those who spurn it. It grips the arrogance much tighter and assumes it is elemental, feeling it wriggle and documenting every facet of it.

If it were truly transcendental, it would fully imbue all of the power of this arrogance into Dai Miyamoto alone. It is not, and so it instills the positivity, the buffoonish self-confidence, into Miyamoto, while splitting the misanthropy and misplaced pride into his educated partner-in-crime, Yukinori Sawabe. What Blue Giant chooses to do is let these two tussle, strengthening each other through resistance. Miyamoto’s unflappability ensures that he virtually always wins, and when their literal conflict cannot punish Sawabe for his malformed social nature, the hand of God does instead, subjecting him to a tragic accident that changes his perspective and lets this arc come to a close. The ultimate triumph of Miyamoto as avatar of joy is the only major concession that author Shinichi Ishizuka makes to the common aesthetic.

This dynamic would likely lean obnoxious were it not for the plight these two men and their erstwhile drummer, Shunji Tamada, find themselves in, poor as church mice and plugging away at blue-collar work to fund their jazz aspirations. Sawabe projects snobbish erudition but rejects his academic peers, stuck in their fixed frameworks, for unruly compositions performed with two amateurs. He’s not a trust-fund heir; he lets his hair down and directs traffic at construction sites — the inescapable physicality of this work unfairly seizes those aspirations away from him by the end. Miyamoto’s brashness is expressed through the literal sonic power of his instrument in public just as often as it is through words. Said arrogance translates to a near-total lack of shame, allowing him to practice daily at the riverside and feel his tones travel across the water. When he loses his meager life savings at the halfway point by random chance, he steels his gaze, honing even further in on his music as he stretches his remaining cash to its limit. Jazz to him, more than the other two, is a method of free self-expression and enjoyment, and a space he can enter despite his unusual background and education. His arrogance, then, is that which allows him to enter jazz spaces and control them without humbling himself to jazz authority through traditional channels. Sawabe first meets Miyamoto in the john, recognizing his dedication through the calluses built up on his thumbs from steadying his sax. These three reclaim jazz as music by and for the everyman.

What that authority exists towards is an environment of institutional decay, that being the jazz in the 21st century, far from its place of origin and from its creative peak. Blue Giant just as often peers into the lives of those within its structure, contextualizing the grace they show the primary trio. Each one reckons with jazz post-description, post-study and thus framed as a fixed object. Jazz exists to fill certain niches, or to perpetuate existing microgenres decades out of date; a pose that Sawabe, as ideological North Star of the trio, explicitly rejects and expresses through the band’s artistic practice. What Blue Giant so deftly navigates is the trail between that of the continuation of the institution and the glimpse of a future, but only its promise, beyond the institution.¹ Those who book the trio, who offer them practice space, who play concerts and promote their music, know that the institution will not be overcome by them alone; the arc ends on imperfect actualization, snuffed out randomly before most can roll the dice on the trio’s possible success. But these peripheral peoples’ investment, shown through the snippets of their personal lives, infuses them with the knowledge that they’ve contributed in small ways to this unseen future.² What matters to this work is not complete actualization of the future, and rapture in the process, but rather that even satellite involvement adds color back to one’s own life; this is the aforementioned engine.

Youth is undoubtedly part of this — seeing the young attack jazz with such fervor — which makes Blue Giant’s opening movements key. They illustrate Miyamoto’s high-school days in a somewhat abbreviated manner; of course, this demonstrates his naivety as he begins his tutelage in the byzantine theory of jazz, juxtaposed against an even more raw iteration of his everyman pose. His growth here yields to institution — when he joins the trio, he has already been molded by the institution to a degree that perpetually separates him from the untrained, desperate Tamada, and the inevitable juxtaposition of a style that venerates the institution just as rankles it drives the tension of the majority of the work — but simultaneously his vigor shines through all the more thanks to his youth. His lens gives him unequal entrée to the iconography of jazz as one befitting his personal style, one of cavernous sound and power, past the stodginess imbued in it to the uninitiated. When he dons Sonny Rollins’ signature mohawk, for instance, during an electrifying performance at a school festival, sandwiched between rock bands, he hooks his fellow students with a shocking demeanor and display that maintains a cognizance of the culture he inherits from. That age gives him a knack for connecting with the students, through Rollins’ colossal figure, that he struggles to preserve as he grows, more and more bound by the walls of institutional jazz.

That power, lest thought otherwise, goes beyond visual depiction as haircuts and hordes of cheering students. Ishizuka’s vision of jazz is one of pouring rain, ropes of spit flung from brass and dripping snares. His usual cross-hatched style, meticulous, gaunt, gives way to the streaks of water. Baggy eyelids and waning buccal pockets lend their shadows to an expression of the rain as emanating lines, each in parallel. Sweat coats each performer’s face. In the panel layouts, solos dilate the flow of time as needed, spreading page-wide on Miyamoto’s distinct, soaring fermatas and clamping to harsh grids as he clips staccato. Sawabe’s solos stretch the panels wide, encompassing the length of the keyboard and his elegant fingers. His hand placement conducts the width when needed, replacing part of the row with his eyes deep in concentration while maintaining the horizontality. And Tamada, inelegant and frantic by comparison, splays out as though captured through long exposure, superimposing the full transmission of each hit whiplike through his arms into his wrist, tracing the sticks across the air. The performances shine, and they rightfully carry their own visual gravity, standing out within the reams of gritty, subdued pages of characters walking and talking in bars, their weary features dried rather than moist. The creation of a visual language to document an auditory medium emerges from natural power and natural force at every layer, from the sketches to the overall construction.³

The modesty of the non-musical panels lets us return to that initial comparison of Shenmue and Blue Giant, both of which start in the quiet routine of one’s hometown. Sendai is anything but a backwater, but its jazz profile is nil as compared to Tokyo, where Miyamoto truly loses himself in the city’s jazz culture. Those back home, however, seem not to begrudge his choice. His young sister grows up before our eyes and yet Miyamoto misses it; his absence for the majority of the work registers in pauses of silent emotional processing during their discussions. Perhaps their family is used to this kind of inadvertent abandonment, having lived motherless. Regardless, they treat his decisions with quiet, unsure respect, crossing their fingers that he’ll land on his feet from passion alone. He supports them increasingly little due to his fixation but the fact alone that he has a fixation seems to make them feel content. Likewise goes for Mai Miwa, his high-school romance, who is entranced by his dedication but ultimately hedges on him. Those moments of living outside of jazz, still occasionally present throughout the opening, fade into single-minded action once he moves, making him a brick wall to his ostensible girlfriend back home. When he returns to Sendai, he only visits his former music teacher, having seen no family member other than his brother, who traveled to Tokyo to bail him out after a bar fight.