Vinyl Listening Bars Help Offer New Yorkers a ‘Music Massage’ - The New York Times

[Brian Josephs]

On one Friday evening, the conversation in the back room of All Blues in TriBeCa, where about two dozen people sat in leather chairs, was overtaken by the music streaming from three large, mid-20th-century speakers.

Behind a D.J. booth, Yuji Fukushima, 62, the owner of the bar, spun a set that included 1980s funk and late-career Dizzy Gillespie, which played from a pair of German-made turntables. Around the room were rare McIntosh amplifiers, a tape recorder from a Swiss audio company and the three speakers — JBL products that altogether cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The bar’s patrons were enjoying what Mr. Fukushima called a “music massage,” inspired by some of his favorite hangouts in Japan, where he grew up.

The lounges, better known as listening bars or listening rooms, are places that are typically centered on a high-quality sound system that plays vinyl records. These bars stem from Japanese cafes, known as jazz kissas, which have a similar focus. In the past year, listening rooms in New York, as well as in other cities, have opened with increasing frequency. Nightlife proprietors point to the sustained popularity of vinyl and a lingering hesitance toward large gatherings after the pandemic. (Tokyo Listening Room and Another Country are others that have opened in Manhattan within the past year.)

All Blues, which opened October 2023, sticks to the quieter, more contemplative atmosphere that characterizes the traditional jazz kissa.

“I see the music bars open here and there, but those are different from what I know from Japan,” said Mr. Fukushima, who also owns the boutique clothing store Blue in Green in SoHo.

D.J. Spinna, who has been playing a biweekly set since All Blues opened, likened stepping into Mr. Fukushima’s bar to walking into another realm.

“Everyone who walks in that place is just mesmerized; it’s like walking into another world,” said D.J. Spinna, who has been playing a biweekly set since All Blues opened.

In the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a popular cocktail bar, St. Ends, reopened in February as Kissa Kissa. It swapped a setup that included iPad playlists on Sonos speakers for a roughly $40,000 sound system that spun jazz vinyl from the 1950s to the mid-70s — though it’s less strict about chatter than All Blues.

Over in Queens, Record Room has the energy of a bustling speakeasy. After walking past the entrance’s cafe and shelves of vinyl records, the atmosphere is more like a dance party. The crowd joins together in full-volume singalongs and line dances to modern R&B hits.

To Nia Bolling, a copywriter in Brooklyn who frequents Record Room and other listening bars, the vibe may have been great, but the sound system was the main appeal.

“There’s some places where you go to where you mostly care about dancing, or you mostly care about socializing,” Ms. Bolling, 31, said. “But with listening rooms, you mostly care about the music and how it sounds. It’s stimulating, but it’s mostly stimulating from, like, an audio perspective.”

Another bar drawing an audiophile crowd is Eavesdrop, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which strikes a balance between contemplative and festive: The songs playing through its bright yellow speakers are at their most crystalline when a visitor stands a few feet in front of them, in a living-room-size space nestled between the confabs of its bar area and the backyard.

“There’s a lot of experiences out there,” said Karl Brisseaux, a D.J. based in New Jersey who regularly visits listening bars. “You can have, you know, a vinyl bar or listening bar that’s more of a party atmosphere, or more of a kind of laid-back atmosphere — one that’s more focused on just sitting and listening.”

The jazz kissas of Japan peaked in popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, when they gave young audiophiles a place to listen to prohibitively expensive jazz records, and declined as CDs became available and buying music grew cheaper. Recently though, jazz kissas are experiencing a revival in Japan, alongside a sustained rise in vinyl sales, according to Lasse Lehtonen, an adjunct professor of Asian studies and musicology at the University of Helsinki.

“There are not so many spaces in our contemporary world where you’re actually going to enter a very specific space where you kind of focus on doing something, such as listening to music and really appreciating that music,” Mr. Lehtonen said.

Danny Keith Taylor, an audio designer who has worked with hospitality spaces including Eavesdrop, said the trend reflected an expanding interest in sound design. Whereas before the pandemic, hospitality spaces tended to hide their audio equipment from the view of patrons, owners are now more willing to display it as a focal point.

Mr. Taylor, 41, said he saw listening bars as “the tip of the spear, of a broader movement of people paying more attention to audio.”

The intimate focus of these bars can be a contrast with the daily cacophony outside their doors.

Their popularity, Mr. Lehtonen said, is “probably also symptomatic of our own contemporary world that an interest in these kinds of spaces has risen and re-emerged.”