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DJ Okawari VibeZ

Fifteen tracks from a Japanese producer whose piano-and-breakbeat records helped invent a genre that now soundtracks half the internet.

DJ Okawari's Tracks, Videos and Upcoming Events

DJ Okawari

DJ Okawari emerged from Japan in the late 2000s making instrumental hip-hop built on live-sounding piano, jazz samples and soft, dusty drums. His track "Flower Dance" became one of the most-played instrumental pieces of its era, and his aesthetic — melancholy, unhurried, structurally simple — is a direct ancestor of what is now called lo-fi hip-hop.

That lineage matters. The whole "beats to study to" phenomenon descends fairly directly from a Japanese scene built around Nujabes, whose Samurai Champloo soundtracks made jazz-hop a global taste before he died in 2010. Okawari is one of the most accomplished figures working in that tradition.

What to listen for

"Bounce" with Talib Kweli is the highest-profile track here and a genuinely well-matched pairing — Kweli's dense, rhythmically busy delivery against a beat that leaves enormous space.

"Starry Sky" and "Evening Comes" are the essential instrumentals and the best demonstration of the piano-first approach.

"A Cup of Coffee" and "Four Water" are the ones that get used most often as background, which is both their function and slightly a shame — there is real compositional care in them.

The vocal collaborations show the range. Emily Styler-era material, Brittany Campbell on "Be There," Giovanca — a Dutch soul singer — on "Keep Falling," and NANASE on "The Bonds."

"Noctiluca" with Marcus D connects him to the Seattle producer who has worked extensively with the Japanese scene.

"Last Note" and "Another Sky" are the most affecting things here.

Go deeper

Diorama (2009) is the album, and it contains "Flower Dance."

Nujabes is the essential next stop — Modal Soul and Metaphorical Music are two of the most beloved instrumental hip-hop albums ever made, and the Samurai Champloo soundtracks are where most Western listeners found him.

For the wider Japanese scene: Uyama Hiroto, Shing02 and Cro-Magnon.

And for what it all descends from: J Dilla's Donuts and Pete Rock. The line from Detroit and New York through Tokyo and back out to a million study playlists is one of the more unlikely journeys in modern music.

A final note on what happened to this music. The jazz-hop that Okawari and Nujabes made was album music, sequenced and credited, and it has since been absorbed into an enormous stream of anonymous, algorithmically-served "lo-fi beats" with no artist attached. Something was lost in that. Playing a record like this in order, with the collaborators named, restores the thing the genre was before it became furniture.

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