‘Kaz’ Kajimura, Bay Area Jazz-Club Impresario, Dies at 81

[mjzee]

For nearly five decades, Kazuo “Kaz” Kajimura ran the pre-eminent jazz venue on the West Coast, hosting legends of the genre: Ray Brown, Betty Carter, Hank Jones, Tito Puente. 

But visitors to Yoshi’s Jazz Club likely wouldn’t recognize Kajimura as the owner of the club. Six days a week for 50 years, he biked to his job, and stayed largely behind the curtain—building and arranging furniture to create clear sightlines for audiences, fixing leaky toilets, planning artist residencies, clearing tables and picking musicians up from the airport. When friends would ask Toshi Holland, Kajimura’s sister, how they could meet the club owner, “I’d tell them, ‘Find a very tiny Japanese guy who looks like the janitor,’ ” she said. “He was wearing beat-up jeans with dirty hands, because he was always fixing something. That’s my brother.”

The club became proof of how a jazz club could endure, both as a waypoint for generations of artists as they toured the West Coast and as an anchor for the local scene. “To have a club like Yoshi’s, with national touring artists in six or seven days a week, and for it to be profitable, that’s an achievement in and of itself,” said Jason Olaine, vice president of programming at the Jazz at Lincoln Center organization in New York, who worked as the artistic director at Yoshi’s in the early 1990s.

“Yoshi’s is a symbol of how a community can support jazz,” Olaine said.

Kajimura died of Alzheimer’s disease on June 15 in Brentwood, Calif., at the age of 81. He is survived by his wife, Dadre Traughber, and four sisters.

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