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March 2025 was a month full of major changes.
I left my job at a logistics company in Chiba and moved to a remote island in Okayama Prefecture called Kōjima, where I’ve started helping an Australian friend manage their cottages. There are no restaurants, supermarkets, or even convenience stores on the island but surprisingly, life here has been more comfortable than I imagined.
In fact, not having access to restaurants has turned out to be a blessing. It forces me to cook healthy meals at home, giving me full control over everything I put into my body. And when I go to the markets on the mainland, I can buy fresh fish and oysters at affordable prices, so I don’t feel inconvenienced in my day-to-day life. While I’m still hesitant to spend money on services provided by massive corporations, even Amazon delivers to the ferry terminal on the island. This made me realize that as long as I have an internet connection and a space where I can play my instrument, I can live pretty much anywhere.
On the island, there are no rules to follow. Unless I have something planned, I wake up whenever I feel like it and go to bed whenever I want. Back when I lived in Inzai, Chiba, I had a routine of practicing bass before work, which meant waking up at 5 a.m. every day. Now that I no longer need to rise early, I usually get up around 9 or 10. Bit by bit, my body clock has started shifting back to a more nocturnal rhythm. There are nights when I brew coffee at 1 a.m. and work late into the night, each day unfolds like an improvisation.
Gradually, I’ve also stopped keeping track of the days of the week Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… they’ve started to lose meaning. Even during the year I spent unemployed in Chiba, I never experienced this kind of detachment from the calendar. There, weekends were always marked by the presence of people parks and supermarkets would get crowded, and stations often hosted events. The behavioral patterns of working class bound to a social system made it easy to feel the difference between weekdays and weekends.
But here on the island, every day feels the same apart from changes in weather. Each morning begins with a blank slate: I ask myself what I want to do, and shape the day from there, guided by mood rather than schedule. No day is more important than another. Even the flow of time itself feels slower than it did when I was living in the suburbs.
If there’s one thing I’m not entirely satisfied with about life on Kōjima, it’s how difficult it is to get cardio exercise. The island is mostly made up of steep hills, and most residents rely on cars to get around. Sure, having a car is convenient when stocking up on groceries from the mainland, but over time, it makes walking feel like a chore. As a result, it’s hard to get the amount of daily physical activity I need. Whenever I try running uphill, my heart rate shoots up too quickly.
Back in Chiba, I used to bike around town almost every day. Since I relied on my bicycle to get to local shops and restaurants, I was getting enough exercise without even thinking about it. That contrast made me realize I needed to build some sort of regular exercise habit so now, after waking up, I’ve started going for runs along the flat stretch of coastline near my house.
All in all, being free from distractions and the stress of human relationships has made life on Kōjima feel like the perfect environment for pursuing music.
A Shift in My Practice Method
There’s also been a significant change in how I approach practice. Until now, I had mostly followed a weekly schedule laid out in advance, repeating a well-rounded routine each day. For example: 40 minutes of triads and foundational exercises, 10 minutes on each transcribed lick, 30 minutes of solo transcriptions, 20 minutes on standards, and 15 minutes of walking bass. It was a structured, comprehensive approach.
But now that I have more uninterrupted time, I’ve stopped assigning specific tasks to specific times or durations. Instead, I jot down my current areas of focus as bullet points in a notebook and decide what to work on based on how I feel that day. While I do make a point to practice solo transcriptions daily to reinforce muscle memory everything else, such as which standards or concepts to explore, is chosen based on what I’m most curious about or eager to improve at that moment. I’ve found that practicing when interest is highest brings a greater return.
Not dividing things by the week also makes it easier to immediately implement new exercises or ideas as they arise. Back when I was working full-time at a large company and had limited time, having a weekly routine meant I didn’t have to rethink my practice plan every day which had its benefits. But now that I have more time and mental space, this shift in method feels like a natural evolution.
This process isn’t limited to learning the language of jazz. I’m beginning to realize that in order to strengthen my own metacognitive learning model, I have to keep my focus not just on what I’m learning, but how I’m learning it. In a way, it feels like I’m undergoing training just to learn how to practice…to practice.
Practice Focus in March
I spent much of March 2025 working on jazz standards. Around the end of last month, I realized that I was still weak in the low positions, and it struck me as something I needed to fix. So I began practicing standards with a self-imposed limitation restricting myself to the low positions and tracing triads. I also took lines that I would normally play entirely in the high position using the A string and instead practiced shifting from low to high positions using only the D and G strings. As expected, playing the same notes on the D or G string in the low positions produces a far richer, more resonant tone compared to the A string in the thumb position.
Since I started on bass guitar, I had a tendency to build phrases that stay within the thumb position. But lately, my left hand has gotten more comfortable shifting between low and thumb position, and I’ve started to pay more attention to tone. With that came the realization that, in many cases, my sound was getting buried in the mix.
I also practiced walking bass lines using a variety of metronome patterns and spent a lot of time comping along with isolated saxophone parts from Joe Henderson tracks using the Moises app. For solo transcriptions, I worked on Blue Train by Coltrane on the silent bass. On bass guitar, I transcribed Bird’s solo on Cosmic Rays, focusing not on the notes themselves, but on the feel of the swing.
In an effort to improve my sense of swing, I also checked out an online masterclass by Mike Longo, who was Dizzy Gillespie’s pianist. In his Volume 1–4 series, he breaks down the rhythmic language he learned directly from Dizzy. Each course costs $39.97, which isn’t cheap, but it greatly deepened my understanding of polyrhythms. Since it’s paid content, I won’t go into the details, but the lessons include not only methods for building rhythm-driven solos, but also the mindset and philosophy behind them forming an experiential learning model passed down directly from Dizzy. Even from a documentary perspective, it was fascinating.
Looking back at my practice notes, I didn’t spend much time working on licks this month. Instead, I transcribed a lot of phrases from Coltrane and Sonny Stitt. The artists and tunes I explored this month leaned more toward earlier jazz: Bird, Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, Trane, Miles, Hank Mobley, Monk, Ornette Coleman. I also spent a fair amount of time listening to classical music; Stravinsky, Bach, Chopin, and Vivaldi.
After listening to improvised music daily, classical music starts to sound especially fresh. Bach in particular stands out his music offers something new with every listen. The refined counterpoint, the triadic inversions when I hear what he created from seemingly nothing, I can’t help but feel he was a human touched by divine inspiration. His music still sounds new today, to the point where calling it “classical” feels almost misleading.