There aren’t many musicians who have had a career quite as peculiar as Masayoshi Takanaka, the Japanese jazz-rock legend who sold out Aragon Ballroom on Tuesday night.
The 73-year-old guitarist played Chicago as the third stop on his first-ever world tour. The “SUPER TAKANAKA WORLD LIVE” tour was announced eight months after his March 2025 performance in Los Angeles, which revealed his unexpected popularity in the U.S.
In Japan, Takanaka is the kind of oldie-but-goodie artist that parents reminisce about to their children. His career peaked in Japan in the late 1970s, when Western-inspired “city pop” music was the soundtrack of the decade’s optimism and economic success. Nowadays, the musician has said his audience at home is mostly people in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
In the U.S., his fanbase tells an entirely different story. In the 2020s, thanks to algorithm-driven recommendations from streaming services like YouTube and Spotify, his music gained a new following from young adults. At an age when most artists retire, Takanaka has found himself experiencing a reignition of fame, with crowds of millennials wrapping around multiple city blocks to enter the Aragon Ballroom, hours before he took the stage.
Donning his signature red suit, Takanaka did not disappoint. Despite his age, he played for almost two hours straight without an opener, delivering 19 different songs spanning a variety of his own albums and covers of other artists.
Takanaka is also a man of few words. Many of his songs are solely instrumental, with Caribbean-inspired guitar loops and jazzy solos at the forefront. Other than yelling out “I love Chicago” toward the end of the show, he barely spoke at all.
But with a simple, rhythmically aligned fist pump, Takanaka electrified the crowd as it collectively shouted “ay” back to him in a manner that almost resembled the spirited energy at a sporting event. Even during the instrumental songs, Takanaka had the crowd singing along to the melody of his bright, plucky guitar licks.
More than once, he soloed so hard that his guitar string snapped, a regular occurrence at his shows. Each time, a well-prepared — and unsurprised — team fixed the guitar in just under a minute.
But the show was no solo act. Takanaka was backed by an impressive band of two keyboardists, a bass player, two drummers and two backup singers. One drummer played a traditional drumset, while the other played hand percussion to complement Takanaka’s groovy guitar solos. The female backup singers served as somewhat of hype women for the guitarist, leading the crowd in chants as he journeyed through several-minute guitar solos.
When Takanaka and his band walked off the stage after the 17th song, the crowd knew the show wasn’t over yet. Slowly, a chant filled the room: “We want surfboard!”
Just minutes later, the Tokyo native was back on the stage with his famous about-13.2-pound surfboard guitar and a smile on his face. The guitar originally made its debut during Takanaka’s 2004 and 2005 tours and is made out of a real surfboard.
The surfboard guitar wasn’t the only trick Takanaka had up his sleeve. After one song with the surfboard guitar, Takanaka pulled out his second pièce de résistance. As the lights on the stage began to flash all the colors of the rainbow, he turned around and grabbed a holographic guitar. After a slow but epic last tune, Takanaka and his band reached their pot of gold. The eight of them united at the front of the stage for a final bow.
For an artist who, at one point, was only regionally known, the young and spirited crowd at the Aragon was a testament to the power of online music discovery platforms. There’s something remarkable about a Japanese musician playing Caribbean-inspired music to a crowd of mostly white Americans — a reminder of just how reciprocal our musical influences have become in the internet era.
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Email: [email protected]
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