Acoustic Adventurer

Ahead of performing at a Mardi Gras event at the Club this month, guitarist Kai Petite explains his passion for making complicated music sound simple and his brush with stardom.

I’m not interested in being a rock star,” says Kai Petite. As a musician who spent four years studying at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston and then several more years being groomed for stardom as a Japanese pop singer, he knows what he wants.

“Being yourself is a big part of playing music,” he says. “It’s OK to create an image and play that role, there is a beauty in that, too, but I prefer it when it’s just me and the music. Hopefully, the audience feels that, too.”

This month, attendees at the Women’s Group’s lunchtime Mardi Gras Fete will have the opportunity to experience just what he means. Petite, 33, who describes his style of guitar playing as “comfortable but exciting,” is heavily influenced by jazz. And while he admits to enjoying improvisation and complicated arrangements, he says he believes in keeping things simple.

“I like using few instruments but still making sounds that are as big as an orchestra or ensemble,” he explains. One of the ways he achieves this is by adding two bass strings to his guitar, an ingenious approach that allows him to play bass, melody and harmony on one instrument.

“I listened to an album by [American jazz guitarist] Pat Metheny and I was blown away by how it sounded like acoustic guitar alongside an upright bass, yet it was just him playing solo. Essentially I tried to mimic that on my regular-sized guitar, which is smaller than Metheny’s. Most people told me it couldn’t be done, but I went for it and it works,” he says.

Aside from artists like Metheny, Tuck Andress and Joni Mitchell, Petite identifies his late father as a musical inspiration. His dad, who passed away in 2011, was an American soldier who relocated to Japan after serving in the Vietnam War. His mother is Japanese and the family settled in Kamakura, where Petite enjoyed a quiet rural upbringing.

“My father played 12-string acoustic guitar as a hobby,” he says. “He also had many records, lots of Irish and Scottish blues folk music. So that’s really where my interest began.”

When he was 17, Petite played backup guitar in a band with one of his father’s coworkers at What the Dickens pub in Ebisu. It was his first taste of performing on stage. A few years later, he headed to Massachusetts after receiving a small scholarship to study at Berklee. “I was at school with all these insane jazz musicians…Hiromi Uehara, Esparanza Spalding. …It was crazy.”

Soon after completing his studies, Petite returned to Kamakura and was introduced to a local talent agency. The following few years of his career he looks back on with some amusement.

“Up until then, I had only wanted to be a backup guitarist. But the company wanted me to sing, even though I couldn’t hold a note,” he says with a laugh. “They sent me to three different voice trainers. I hated singing and, on top of it, they forced me to sing in Japanese, which didn’t come naturally to me since the music I had grown up listening to had been in English.”

Petite’s appearance was vastly different then as well. Instead of the long hair and relaxed style he sports today, the company execs primped and preened him to appeal to the 40-something, Japanese female market.

“The idea was this foreign-looking guy, singing fluently in Japanese. So my first album sounds like an acoustic version of Japanese ’80s pop,” he says. “Luckily, it wasn’t that successful, because if I had made it, that’s what I would have become.”

It’s fortunate for music lovers as well. If Japan’s pop music machine had kept hold of Petite, he would never have released works like his latest (and fourth) album, “Busk Till Dawn,” a creative collaboration with harmonica virtuoso Natsuki Kurai. Audiences, too, would have been denied the chance to hear a musician with more concern for “exploring who I am” than making a quick buck.

Luck is a Tokyo-based writer and editor.

Words: Annemarie Luck
Photo: Yuuki Ide

Monthly Program: Mardi Gras Fete
Feb 4
11:30am (doors open: 11am)
Manhattan I
Women’s Group members: ¥3,000
Non-Women’s Group members: ¥4,000
Adults only
Prices exclude 8 percent consumption tax.