Greenroom Festival brings Yokohama bayside to life

Fuji Rock and Summersonic may occupy the headlines, but Japan has a bevy of second-tier music festivals that have each whittled out spaces for themselves in the country’s crowded concert market.

Among them, Greenroom is perhaps the best conceived in terms of its branding and focus on a specific demographic. Named after the space inside a perfectly formed wave, the festival’s title indicates its focus on surf culture.

For the last decade now, the spring festival has brought to life the Yokohama bayside area around the historic Red Brick Warehouse — one of the few surviving relics of the port town’s history as a Western beachhead in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This year’s weekend­-long fest on May 21-22 sees several strong international acts topping the bill. Saturday’s lineup is headed by Rodrigo y Gabriela, a Spanish instrumental guitar duo whose virtuoso counterpoint takes its inspiration from heavy metal as much as classical flamenco.

The inimitable, enduring soul icon Chaka Khan brings her bottomless lungs and hits like “I Feel for You” to Greenroom’s outdoor stage on Sunday. Filling out the bill are a number of durable domestic acts, including UA, who transitioned from acid jazz idol to experimental jazz singer, and art­-pop outfit Clammbon.

With its promise of “music, art, film,” Greenroom takes in a lot more than the concerts themselves, running the full gamut of surf culture. Among the creative types making the trip to Japan are California multimedia artist and head of publisher Um Yeah Arts, as well as French photographer Bernard Testemale, who works with large­-format cameras to take stunning images of surfers and the sea.

Some of the films look beyond surfer dude cliches. "Glimpses of Kolkata," for example, follows an international team of surfers who journeyed to India for the rare 2015 phenomenon in which a solar eclipse and three other unusual astronomical phenomena converge to make the river rush backwards, creating standing waves in Kolkata’s Hooghly River, for a "tide­ of­ the­ century" and fascinating meeting of cultures.

So successful has founder Naoki Kamayachi been at cobbling together artists, fans and sponsors, that last year he launched a Hawaii edition. This year’s Greenroom Festival Hawaii takes place in Waikiki on Sept 16.

Red Brick Warehouse map

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