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Jazz Kissa

kissa Jazz kissa (Japanese: ジャズ喫茶), sometimes transliterated as jazu kissa, are cafés that specialise in the playing and appreciation of recorded jazz music. Unique to Japan, jazz kissa are spaces where jazz music is played for dedicated listening rather than as background music.

A typical jazz kissa features a high-quality stereo system, a large music collection and dim lighting, and serves coffee and alcoholic drinks. However, this trend declined at the end of the 1960s alongside the deaths of free jazz musicians John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and the disintegration of the New Left. Japanese musician Otomo Yoshihide wrote that the classic jazz kissa of the 1970s was a 15 m 2 room with a counter, several hundred vinyl LPs, a large collection of magazines and "a pair of huge JBL or Altec speakers".

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