2023-7-31
Marty Holoubek and Marty Hicks are Australian musicians living in Japan. Marty Holoubek is from Adelaide and has been living in Japan since 2018. After working in the Australian music scene for many years, Holoubek relocated to Tokyo, where he has been performing with the likes of SMTK, ROTH BART BARON, Eiko Ishibashi, Answer to Remember, Jim O’Rourke and Terumasa Hino, as well as working as a freelancer on various other musical projects.
Marty Hicks is from Melbourne and has been living in Japan since 2015. He is a graduate of the jazz improvisation course at The University of Melbourne (Faculty of the VCA) and became a MEXT scholar in 2015 before entering into a Masters course at Tokyo University of the Arts, where he majored in composition for film, animation, and various media projects. Hicks currently works as a freelance composer and sound designer alongside lecturing in the Music Design faculty at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music.
In this interview, the two musicians talk about their experiences navigating the Japanese music industry, their work supporting communities in the Tohoku region, and why they are so passionate about educating the next generation of musical artists in Japan.
Navigating the Japanese Music Industry and Overcoming Challenges
Since arriving in Japan in 2015 and 2018, Hicks and Holoubek have spent much of their time collaborating with Japanese musicians, but this has not always been without its challenges.
A question for both of you, in terms of the musical projects that you're working on now, do you collaborate much with Japanese musicians?
Marty Holoubek: I do, I mostly collaborate with Japanese musicians, and that was part of the reason I moved here as well. I came here on a whim, on a tour with a band once and while I was here, I got to play with some Japanese musicians. Through that, I have built this connection with the music community here.
It's been an enlightening and deep experience, working with musicians from Japan who have come from completely different backgrounds than where I've come from. We work in a field where we have a shared love of music, but I couldn’t communicate early on in Japanese. It really opened my way of communicating and developing ideas within a musical context. It's been enjoyable. I feel like the community here is special, and I'm glad to be a part of it.
Marty Hicks: In terms of my experiences, since being here, the overwhelming majority of people I've collaborated with are Japanese. While I perform here and there, my music career is more around composition and writing stuff for other people, and most of the design companies and advertising companies I’ve worked with have been Japanese clients.
Dealing with Japanese clients can be quite different from dealing with clients back home – there is a strive for absolute perfection, for better or worse. But what I really like about the culture is the pursuit of “bespokeness” – Japan has this great culture of artisanry.
When working with Japanese clients on a project I often feel like I'm part of the design process. The sounds that I'm making have an influence on how the product is perceived by the public. I find that really fulfilling, and it's not done by half measures – that's been my personal experience.
How did you overcome some of those language barriers in the beginning when you were trying to communicate with those Japanese musicians?
Marty Holoubek: There was much frustration in the early days. But it definitely helps if you put in some time to learn the language. It just opens up so many avenues. When I first moved here, you could kind of communicate ideas musically. If I wanted something to happen, I could play it on my instrument and be like ‘this is what I want.’ But to get to a deeper level, having the skills to speak the language really helped.
Marty Hicks: I think if you don't know the language, people here try much harder to help you out.
What are some challenges you have encountered in the music industry in Japan, and how did you overcome them?
Marty Hicks: Maybe this isn't so unique to the music industry, but in Australia, it's very common to have an experience where you meet someone for the first time, and it feels like you’ve been friends for a while.
In Japan, however, it's often the opposite – it can be tricky to break through this wall that people have built around themselves. Something significant needs to happen, or more time needs to be spent together for you to connect with them personally.
I think a lot of it comes down to them wanting to be polite towards others – there's this whole cultural thing about keeping enough distance to make the other person feel respected. I guess as Australians, our culture is often the opposite to that, in a way; the more you treat people as your equal – for example, the more casual you are with them – the better.
Marty Holoubek: The only thing that sticks out as something I've had to try and break through and understand is the culture about seniority and junior figures – the senpai/kohai culture.
In Australia, regardless of age or anything, you’re assessed as a person and also as a musician. Here, there have been a few situations where someone talks about how great someone is as a musician. But then I found out later on it was not the case. It was just a compliment, as this person was a senior in the scene. That has made me hit a few roadblocks in my creative pursuit.
Marty Hicks: I have found that I do get a bit of leeway, as opposed to my Japanese colleagues, for committing certain faux pas – like not following that hierarchy of seniors and juniors – which makes the culture easier to navigate, but at the same time you want to be as respectful as possible.
On Educating Younger Generations About Music
Both Marty Hicks and Marty Holoubek have been involved in educating younger people about music, through appearing on television, teaching, and community work in Tohoku. It’s a topic that both musicians care deeply about.
Marty Hicks, you’re a lecturer at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music – how long have you been teaching there, and what’s unique about this school?
I started at Senzoku in April 2020, so this is my fourth year there. It’s one of Japan’s most prominent music universities, with a burgeoning student intake and top-shelf facilities. It was also the first university in Japan to establish a jazz course, so it's renowned for that.
There are a lot of prolific artists that graduated from there who are now doing things like playing in bands and writing music for film & TV. I'm working within the Music Design course, essentially teaching what I do in my professional life: writing music for many different kinds of media, like film and TV.
Marty Holoubek, you used to appear on a children’s television show in Japan – how did you get involved with that opportunity and what was that experience like?
Oh, yeah, that's an interesting story. It was a show called Musica Piccolino, and it's about introducing mostly kids, but also adults, to different forms of music from all around the world and explaining what makes those forms of music unique. I guess I'm biased as I was a part of it, but it was a great show. It showcases things that you may have taken for granted in music, but also, you know, teaches people about specific musical things which you wouldn't learn unless you studied music.
The TV show producers initially contacted the Australian Embassy asking for someone fluent in English and Japanese and from Australia. They sent me there after being in Japan for about a month and not speaking the language.
When they asked me to come and audition for their TV show, I didn’t know anything about it or that it was a big deal being on NHK. So, I rocked up casually to this thing, and then once I got to NHK and saw the facilities and the size of the place, I was immediately nervous about my audition.
But I got through the audition, and it was an incredible experience, and I got to be a part of the show for two years. It was my first time ever acting on TV, which was a great experience. I learned a lot very quickly, also acting in a language that you don't speak is quite challenging.
Do you have any standout memories from your time working on the show?
I think mainly meeting the creative team. The actors on the show are great, of course, they're all fantastic musicians well-established within the Japanese music scene, but also the production team on the creative side of the company that made the show was really inspiring. Seeing how they work and how they create themes and projects and direct in a way that's really inducive to creativity, whilst keeping strictly within a format is very impressive.
Both of you are quite involved in music education for younger people. Why is this important to you?
Marty Hicks: I think it's a tricky era. For musicians, especially up-and-coming musicians, it will get trickier before it gets easier. Thanks in large part to advancements in technology, improvements or changes in music, how we listen to music, and how music is made, are being made at an alarming rate nowadays. I imagine teaching today is a different experience than how it was for past generations, in that the teachers are just as much students as the students are. You have a little bit of a leg up experience-wise, but I am finding there are many students that are more on the pulse than some of the older teachers.
It can be tricky to help younger people feel okay with not knowing what the typical music career of the future is going to look like, and how not to lose their passion for creating music and give up entirely as a result, in favour of something more financially viable. More often than not, while teaching I find myself putting a lot of emphasis on encouraging students to simply pursue the joy of making music, because more often than not, that naturally leads you down your own career path.
In this age of rapidly advancing technology and the fact that so much of society is now online, the younger generation expects to know things instantaneously. If they face a problem in class, they don't often spend time figuring out ways around it themselves. They just look it up and move on – or if they can’t find the solution online in a matter of seconds, they give up. A lot of my teaching practices center on presenting ways to approach a problem, potential solutions, and the importance of self-directed learning – I often find myself saying, “Here’s how other people have made this, and you could do the same thing, but what if you did something completely different?”. The more I talk to younger people pursuing music, the more I feel like innovation, curiosity and experimentation will be the key to their success.
Marty Holoubek: Continuing from that, I was very lucky my dad was a music educator as well, and I went through a really great music programme from my junior high school onwards.
There were two main things that stood out for me with music. I feel it is an incredible form of release for people, just having this kind of creative outlet. To have something that you can turn to when times are hard, or a way to express yourself creatively, or just work on something and keep it to yourself. I think it’s really important, and I learned a lot through music about how to deal with problems in life.
The other big thing for me follows from what Hicks said. Learning how to learn.
I think music teaches you and gives you the skills to learn how to learn things in a very particular way, where you want to be able to do something, so you work out how to get from this step to the next step. That’s the benefit of having good teachers. They can guide you through that process.
But at the end of the day, you have to learn how to learn to do the thing. In this culture where people look up the answer, you lose a lot of that foundation that will support you. Especially in a musical way, to do other things. I worry about the impatience of the next generation. I think learning how to learn is important.
Marty Hicks: It’s the obstacle of convenience. At first glance, it seems like having these amazing tools at our fingertips is a good thing, but I think we lose a lot through convenience. I feel like the ability to know how to learn is getting lost. There's definitely something to be said about navigating obstacles.
And with music, the important thing is standing out from the crowd. That’s another huge Pandora's box we could open right now, but there is a lot of emphasis on how to sound like other professionals – how to get to the point where you're on par with them. Going through university in Melbourne, then to university in Japan, then teaching in Japan, I see a lot of that. You're just watching tutorials about how to get this specific sound, and that's it.
Thousands of other people have made that sound, so how do you find your own way? How do you find your own voice? I feel like that's the answer. Overcoming things without getting someone else to show you how to do them.
Marty Holoubek: We grew up just as YouTube started when we were teenagers. But up until that point, you'd listen to music, or you listen to something, and you would just have to figure out how to do it. And then you might have to come at it in a completely different way, but it got the same result. But because of that, it’s shaped how you approach things in a different way.
Marty Hicks: It's kind of like spending several days working away at the lock on your prison cell. And then, on the last day, when you finally get to open it, you realise you could have just walked straight through the bars. The result is the same, but you’re a different person.
Supporting the Tohoku Region with the Australian Embassy
Since 2018, Marty Holoubek has been touring Japanese schools in the Tohoku region, with Marty Hicks joining the school visits from 2020. The two musicians explain how they became involved in this important project and why this area of Japan is so special.
Let's talk about your work with the Australian Embassy and your support for the Tohoku Project. What kind of work have you been doing with that, and how did you get involved?
Marty Holoubek: I got involved soon after I moved here in 2018. It was at the time when the Australian Embassy had a lot to do with Tokyo Jazz Festival. There was an Australian band that was brought over to play there, and then the following weekend was Iwate Jazz Festival, and I was playing with a band.
At that time, there was a piano player and saxophone player who would go up to Iwate and do some workshops in schools in some of the areas that were impacted by the tsunami, but then the piano player broke his foot doing jujitsu. So, I got called up at the last minute, and as I had just moved to Japan, had a lot of free time and was available to go up and hang out.
It involves going to schools and areas around the communities that were affected and doing workshops with younger musicians and concerts for the community. It's been a wild experience. Seeing the complete devastation that happened and the rebuilding after, has been really heavy for me.
Marty Hicks: Initially, I didn’t do the school visits. We had an original jazz trio that played at the Iwate Jazz Festival. The first time I did the school visit was in 2020, but it’s a culture that they've been nurturing for a while, and in terms of my personal experiences, I love it.
It's a special time, and the committee in Iwate that organises it is just full of amazing, dedicated, hardworking people who do a lot for the culture in Iwate. I often think when I go there, it's kind of a strange thing to have these random Australian jazz musicians visit these rural schools. They have no idea who we are. We play jazz for a little bit and talk about it, but it feels good, and everyone is pleased to see us.
Marty Holoubek: Now that we’ve been doing it regularly, we've gotten into a rhythm of how to make it work, and we know what works and doesn't work. And it's really fun and such a good experience.
It's 12 years since the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku. What kind of support do you think is still needed there?
Marty Holoubek: In Australia, there's a programme where musicians would go over to rural schools and perform music for kids that have never seen live music before. And that, to me, was the beginning of understanding the importance of music. I think it would be great if people travelled to Iwate and Tohoku more and performed in those areas where people are moving out from to big cities.
For the kids out there, having access to live music being performed is such an interesting thing. I was lucky enough to have that when I was growing up, too, seeing bands come through my school and perform in front of us, I think that opened up a whole world for me in a special way.
Marty Hicks: I think all the affected areas have really been putting a lot of energy into revitalisation. To get the tourists to come back to the area, there's a lot of energy now going toward remembering what is special and good about those areas. To follow on from what Holoubek was saying, putting on things like jazz festivals and cultural events is also cool – there’s every possibility that some of the greatest future Japanese musicians could end up coming from that area, thanks to the rare, unique musical experiences that are these visits.
What would you say to other Australians who want to visit Tohoku? What is special about that area?
Marty Hicks: I’m a big literature nut, and I’ve always enjoyed the literary background that Iwate has. There is a famous writer called Kenji Miyazawa who is from the Iwate area, and quite a few of his stories are inspired by the landscape of the prefecture. The legacy he left behind exists there, and there is a nice train line inspired by one of his novels.
The area is also a hotspot for spirits as many folk legends were born there. I have an interest in folklore, and for me Tohoku is a big folklore hotspot, and that’s one of the things I find interesting about it.
Marty Holoubek: For me, the food and the nature out there are so incredible, the nature along the coast, and some of the beaches, then also the contrast between the beach and mountains. And especially along the coast, the seafood is unbelievable. That would be my recommendation for anyone heading out that way.
Australia-Japan Relations and Strengthening Cultural Ties
Despite their cultural and geographical differences, the two musicians recognize the strong bond between the Australian and Japanese people and have their own ideas and advice for musicians coming to Japan as well as thoughts on strengthening cultural ties even further.
Why do you think Australia and Japan have such a strong relationship despite being geographically far apart and having cultural differences?
Marty Holoubek: I guess it has something to do with being both island nations. There might be some similarities with everything that comes with that.
Marty Hicks: On some strange level, I feel like maybe the Australian people and the Japanese people are on the same wavelength. I just feel like maybe the typical Australian persona and the Japanese persona are almost conducive to one another. Maybe it's because they're polar opposites.
Marty Holoubek: I think this has something to do with humbleness and being modest. An example for me is that I remember there was a Japanese musician who lived in America for a long time, and he ran this jam session.
I was there one night, came off the stage. He came up to me and said, ‘Man, you sounded so great, really awesome!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah sorry, I made a couple of mistakes’, and then he said to me, ‘Hey, you’re being too Japanese right now’, so that kind of thing is shared, I feel.
Marty Hicks: I think it's just such a strange dichotomy, in the fact that we are kind of the opposite and also the same. I've had a lot of friends over the years that when I mentioned being Australian, tell me they’ve always wanted to go and live and work there for a year. I think a lot of that might come from the fact that the Australian culture is so drastically different from Japanese culture – the work culture is totally different – and they want to experience that. And being Australian, the culture of Japan being so radically different from Australia was enough for me to feel like I needed to be there to experience it.
What recommendations would you make to Australian musicians who would like to come and perform in Japan and to Japanese musicians visiting Australia?
Marty Hicks: There are a lot of people from Australia that would like to come to Japan. In the last couple of years, there has been a rise in excitement about Japan, with more and more musicians wanting to go on tour here.
Marty Holoubek: There are a lot of hurdles on the way to making that work. Apart from the technical advice, if you wanted to collaborate with musicians in Japan, you should check out their music, try and catch a show or even reach out to them. Because most people are pretty friendly. If you can speak some Japanese, that would be handy. Even if you make an effort, that's always good.
Marty Hicks: There are a lot of excellent musicians in Japan, but with the world being the way it is, a lot of them can’t afford to just make music. Many people work full-time at a company and do music in their spare time, so there are a lot of cases where if they receive any interest in their music or offer to collaborate, they just love it. In my experience, there are a lot of musicians that are open to doing collaborative stuff, and that could lead to organising a tour, which is much more difficult because of a lot of logistical things. There is a culture of mutual appreciation across borders.
It's just not a very easy country to organise gigs and tours because of financial reasons. But even then, I find a lot of people, especially from Australia, are willing to lose a bit of money just to come and play here.
Marty Holoubek: For Japanese musicians that want to go to Australia and collaborate, I feel like most Australian musicians are pretty open to receiving a message saying they’d like to work together or saying, ‘Hey, I’m a big fan.’
Marty Hicks: Yeah. It's the same thing. Like a lot of things, I think it just comes down to money. Australia is very expensive. It can be hard to fund that sort of stuff, but when considering the artistic things that happen as a result, the ends justify the means. You know, it's nurturing and culturally enriching enough to be worthwhile.
What support or infrastructure do you think would help in strengthening further Australia-Japan musical collaborations in the future?
Marty Holoubek: The appreciation for the arts in Japan is such a beautiful thing and very helpful to have a career in music. Regarding infrastructure, exchanges like the one the Australian Embassy has with the Tohoku Programme and what it used to have with Tokyo Jazz Festival were heading in the right direction. Still, COVID did put a strain on them.
I think the Japanese government making visas more achievable for artists who want to come and work in Japan would improve things. For example, being able to come here on a working musician visa to perform, without having to go through all the checks and balances you have to do to come to Japan as a musician would open up a more significant cultural exchange.
It’s hard for musicians to come here without being backed by a Japanese company or something. And if that changed, it would be so great. It would be great if there were more push for the arts from both sides.
Marty Hicks: Besides residencies, bringing people out from the country and organising tours or workshops.
Marty Holoubek: That’s the infrastructure we’d like to see.
So then, how would Japanese audiences benefit from seeing more Australian jazz music? What's unique about Australian jazz?
Marty Hicks: I think maybe this is as true for Japan or Australia as it is for any other country, but listening to music from another place is always worthwhile.
Marty Holoubek: Jazz is Black American music that was invented in the 1920s and then got exported over the world. And due to distance and time, probably entered Australia and Japan at similar times.
From that, they both took on this art form and developed it in a very unique way. It could be part of the island culture as well. So then, seeing two cultural experiments of taking this Black American music, then going in their own directions with it and seeing where they both ended up, and the similarities and differences, is so interesting to me.
Marty Hicks: It's interesting because they've taken something like jazz, which in and of itself requires reinterpretation and self-expression, and interpreted it in their own way.
The question is difficult because, under the umbrella term of jazz, the only constant is that there is no constant. It's free and allows free expression, so the results are different depending on where you have that expression and in what context you have it.
Japan’s improvised music scene is a product of their interpretation of “jazz”, and the breadth of it has always been a source of fascination for me.
There have been discussions here and there in Australia about how there is an Australian jazz sound – it's hard to draw definitions around it, but there is an Australian sound and vibe.
Marty Holoubek: With the generations above us, our mentors, and people we've looked up to in the 1990s and early 2000s, the conversation was all about what Australian jazz is and what constitutes Australian jazz. How is this different from outside Australia, and how is it unique in the jazz world, and that got passed down to us as the next generation.
We have a lot to thank those people for who took the time to consider the image of creating music in Australia, playing music from outside Australia in Australia, and thinking about what makes it unique. That's a really important thing to think about.
The Current State of Live Music in Japan
Perhaps not just in Japan, but all over the world, the last three years have been a particularly tumultuous time for performing musicians. Marty Holoubek explains how he managed to keep on performing despite the difficulties of the pandemic.
Photo:Kana Tarumi
How is the live music scene doing in Tokyo since the worst of the pandemic is now over, and can you recommend some good live music venues in Japan?
Marty Holoubek: Like everywhere in the world, the music community struggled during the early days of the pandemic. But for me, in Japan, it stopped for about two months in the beginning. Then we worked around it. Everything became a streaming gig online, and then there were gigs with a curfew; everything had to be closed by 9 pm. So instead of cancelling all the gigs, people moved them to start three hours earlier.
I might be in a very lucky situation, but I never really stopped. I just kept going but also stayed within the rules of the pandemic guidelines. Since things came back to some normality last year, everyone wanted revenge for the two years of not doing any work. So suddenly, it was like every festival was on, and every gig was on every night. And that has kept going and still exists now. It's great, fruitful, and fun.
As far as venues that I can recommend, depending on what you want to see, if it's jazz, I recommend the Shinjuku Pit Inn as one of my favourite places to play music. Also, there are quite a few fun little bars to go to if you want to see creative music – there is one called No Room For Squares, which is fun.
Then, there are the big ones like Tokyo Blue Note and Billboard, where you could see more established artists but not so many Japanese artists. If you want to come to Japan, it's worth seeing a lot of music that's made in Japan.
Marty Hicks: As far as venue recommendations, Kyoto has a lot of really nice venues – one of them is called Jittoku, and there’s also UrBANGUILD.
In Tokyo, I like a place in Kagurazaka called Kagurane, which puts on a lot of electronic music. Spread in Shimokitazawa is also worth a mention.
Marty Holoubek: Also, Tokuzo in Nagoya, it’s a legendary blues venue that has been around forever, it's open till 5 am every night, and it's just an incredible hub for music that comes out of Nagoya.
Photo: Kana Tarumi
Current and Future Projects
Although both musicians are busy working on different collaborations with Japanese musicians and companies, they still have some ambitions for personal projects they’d like to develop in the future too.
What kind of musical projects are you working on now?
Marty Hicks: I have a couple of exciting things in the pipeline. At the moment, I’m working with a company that has made a bespoke private gym that is about the size of a Japanese apartment. It uses AI to monitor your physical statistics and that kind of thing. It's like a personal trainer machine, and they’ve tailored it so there is a 60-minute workout that you can customise yourself.
It's a very new project that they're working on, and they needed sound design and music for it. I've been writing a full suite of music for that over the past few months.
There's also a film project I'm working on now, and then some of my own original music projects too. Holoubek and I have a small band that I have been writing music for, which also features a Japanese saxophone player called Kei Matsumaru.
Marty Holoubek: I guess for me getting back into the swing of things, last year was pretty eventful musically. I took a break at the beginning of this year and have been getting back into it. I have lots of recording projects on the go with various artists from around Japan and internationally.
I think the main focus for me this year is to build upon the relationships that I have in the music industry here in Japan, whilst focusing a little bit more on my own music, as well as writing and putting a new album or EP out this year and getting that out to the world.
What kind of projects would you like to work on in the future?
Marty Holoubek: I would like to be writing a lot more music on the projects I'm involved with, recording a lot more, and producing music in a financially stable way. Focusing on a few projects and having the time to invest in them without worrying about money or time constraints.
My dream is to have a studio in the Japanese countryside, where I go out there and record and make music, and then come back to the cities to do shows and tours and hopefully tour internationally too.
Another thing I've been putting a lot of thought into lately is how we can continue the collaboration between Australian and Japanese musicians. There have been so many attempts at that by various people. I have been a part of some of them, and I've seen others happen, and it's really hard to keep it sustainable. But there is a way to do it. I'm not sure what that is yet. But I would like to be able to make that work.
Marty Hicks: I have a couple of dream projects. I think a lot about aroma, space, sound, and music. The music that I make personally is on the same wavelength as aroma, like it could be enjoyed with a certain type of aroma. So I've always thought about collaborating with an incense company or perfumer to produce both an aural and olfactory work.
I also like traditional Japanese culture, and I have a creative project that has been on the go for quite a few years where traditional musicians are involved. We've been borrowing modern music techniques, using them with traditional techniques, and doing a lot of that sort of thing. I feel like the type of music I make would go really well with Ikebana, too.
Thank you to Marty Holoubek and Marty Hicks for the interview. You can learn more about these two artists and listen to their music at https://www.martinholoubek.com/ and http://www.martyhicks.com/
Read more about Australia's support and the Embassy's engagement with the Tohoku region here.