71-year-old guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka dazzled fans with a hit-filled setlist, treating fans of an international genre to a once-in-a-lifetime show at LA’s Wiltern Theatre.

The legendary Japanese jazz fusion guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka performed his first show in the United States in 40 years to a sold-out crowd at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday evening.

The show, part of a two-night limited run announced in September that sold out instantly, acknowledges a remarkable late-career resurgence for the guitarist fueled by a growing popularity of Japanese jazz fusion and city pop music from the 1970s and ‘80s in the U.S.

Dressed in his signature red suit with a white button down and black bowtie, Takanaka and his band performed an electrifying two-hour set featuring some of the musician’s biggest hits including “Oh! Tengo Suerte,” “Thunderstorms,” “Finger Dancin’” and a funkified cover of Santana’s “Europa (Earth’s Cry, Heaven’s Smile).” Throughout the evening, the guitarist’s signature blend of jazzy guitar solos and island vibes elicited one of the loudest, most engaged audiences I’ve ever witnessed. It was easy to see Takanaka was enjoying the show just as much as his audience.

“I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” Takanaka said enthusiastically. “And now, I’m your grandpa’s age. But I’m young! My dream is [a] Grammy! Come on!”

Whether “this” meant returning to the U.S. to perform or for his music to have reached such a widespread audience in America (and globally) is unclear. One thing, however, is crystal clear. Americans, especially young white men in their twenties and thirties, have been waiting a long time to see the music of Takanaka and his contemporaries performed live too.

Albums from pioneering Japanese pop and jazz fusion artists started garnering millions of views in the mid-2010s thanks to the YouTube algorithm recommending them to fans of jazz stateside. Beyond that, Japanese music from the ‘70s and ‘80s has proliferated popular music in the U.S. over the past decade.

Grimes sampled Takanaka’s 1981 track “Penguin Dancer” on her 2015 song “Butterfly.” This fan-made MF DOOM mixtape to the music of Tatsuro Yamashita garnered millions of views in 2018 before being taken down due to a copyright claim by Sony Music Entertainment Japan (a new version has earned 1 million views since 2022). And Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 folk pop classic Hosono House inspired Harry Styles’ 2022 album Harry’s House, to name a few examples.

More recently, self-proclaimed musicologists and Japanese jazz fusion fans creating content on TikTok paired with the utter obsession with everything Japan — monthly visitors to Japan hit record highs in January, partly driven by the skyrocketing Pokemon trading card industry, anime, food and denim — have taken the fandom to a whole new level.

Japanese city pop and jazz fusion were heavily inspired by popular U.S. groups during the ‘70s and ‘80s and songs often feature English lyrics. But the idea of someone like Tatsuro Yamashita, Mariya Takeuchi or Caseopia coming to the U.S. to perform has seemed like a pipedream for most fans of the genres.

For Takanaka, arguably Japan’s most virtuosic guitar player and the face of the genre he helped pioneer, to come and perform live in the U.S. is a monumental victory for fans and the growth of a genre that peaked in Japan more than 40 years ago.

Audience members near me had traveled from New York, Atlanta, Japan and France to see Takanaka perform. All of the fans I spoke with felt this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see one of their favorite artists in person.

According to anecdotes from fans in person and shared on the Masayoshi Taknaka subreddit, audiences at Takanaka shows in Japan are typically the same age as the guitarist and are quiet besides for a respectful clap after each song. That was not the case Sunday night. The sold-out audience of twenty and thirty-somethings was as raucous as could be, offering a thunderous boom of applause and screams after each song.

You could tell Takanaka and his bandmates were feeding off the energy and enjoying the experience. Takanaka often threw his fist into the air with a smile of victory during his guitar solos and occasionally shot his bandmates a glance of disbelief as if saying, “Can you believe these white kids are enjoying the show this much?”

I, along with every other fan in attendance and the tens-of-thousands of others who were following along online, hope that the enthusiastic reception and overwhelming demand for tickets for these two LA shows inspires Takanaka to tour more in the U.S. A video I shared on my TikTok account the day after the show has over 250,000 views, as of Monday, with more hundreds of comments from fans in Seattle, Minnesota, Alabama, Europe and beyond begging Takanaka to perform outside of Japan again soon.

One would think having a late-career resurgence to the degree of which Takanaka is experiencing would be hard to ignore. Perhaps these two shows were a litmus test to see if fans would come out to U.S. shows. I think Takanaka has his answer.

During the encore Takanaka thanked the audience for its “warm voices” before launching into an unexpected bustout of the fan-favorite “You Can Never Come to This Place,” the closing track from his 1981 magnum opus The Rainbow Goblins.

The guitarist closed the show with an electrified version of “Star Spangled Banner,” a nod to Jimi Hendrix’s innovative and shocking reimagining of the country’s national anthem at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969.

It was a victorious cap to a night that proved the septuagenarian still rocks just as hard as he did in the ‘80s. The only signifier of his age was the absence of his iconic red surfboard guitar, which, at nearly 14 pounds, is perhaps too heavy to wear on stage these days.

Takanaka’s rendition of the national anthem also felt like a subtle reminder that even during times of uncertainty, there are still moments of hope to look forward to in America if you know where to look. That somehow, if we can all come together, everything will be okay.

— —