His club became the go-to spot for generations of musicians touring the West Coast, and a place for local students to play alongside legends
By Charley Locke
July 17, 2025 Wall Street Journal
For nearly five decades, Kazuo “Kaz” Kajimura ran the pre-eminent jazz venue on the West Coast, hosting legends of the genre: Ray Brown, Betty Carter, Hank Jones, Tito Puente.
But visitors to Yoshi’s Jazz Club likely wouldn’t recognize Kajimura as the owner of the club. Six days a week for 50 years, he biked to his job, and stayed largely behind the curtain—building and arranging furniture to create clear sightlines for audiences, fixing leaky toilets, planning artist residencies, clearing tables and picking musicians up from the airport. When friends would ask Toshi Holland, Kajimura’s sister, how they could meet the club owner, “I’d tell them, ‘Find a very tiny Japanese guy who looks like the janitor,’ ” she said. “He was wearing beat-up jeans with dirty hands, because he was always fixing something. That’s my brother.”
The club became proof of how a jazz club could endure, both as a waypoint for generations of artists as they toured the West Coast and as an anchor for the local scene. “To have a club like Yoshi’s, with national touring artists in six or seven days a week, and for it to be profitable, that’s an achievement in and of itself,” said Jason Olaine, vice president of programming at the Jazz at Lincoln Center organization in New York, who worked as the artistic director at Yoshi’s in the early 1990s.
“Yoshi’s is a symbol of how a community can support jazz,” Olaine said.
Kajimura died of Alzheimer’s disease on June 15 in Brentwood, Calif., at the age of 81. He is survived by his wife, Dadre Traughber, and four sisters.
Trumpet on a lake
Kajimura was born on Oct. 31, 1942, in Tokyo. His mother, Yoshi Kajimura, was a cooking teacher; his father, Noriyuki Kajimura, was an engineer. Kajimura’s interests in both music and making things with his hands started in childhood. Growing up after World War II, he would sew doll clothes for his three younger sisters. As a teenager, he decided to teach himself the trumpet, so in the evenings, he’d head to the local park, take a rowboat into the middle of the lake, and practice.
It was the start of a life lived on his terms, shaped by his own convictions. “In Japan, people were expected to live one way, and he wanted to break that,” said Holland. “He told me, ‘You have to make up your own reality.’ ”
In 1972, Kajimura moved to the U.S. and became a reporter, earning a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from Stanford. His then-wife, Yoshie Akiba, opened Yoshi’s, a 19-seat Japanese restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., along with a chef, Hugh “Hiro” Hori. Kajimura quickly realized he liked the restaurant business more than journalism, and he started working there full time. Soon, Yoshi’s moved to a bigger location in Oakland. Members of the local Japanese community started to come by and play traditional instruments together in the parking lot: taiko, a koto, a shinobue, a samisen. Kajimura built a stage by the bar, and they started booking local jazz musicians.
As the small Japanese restaurant developed a reputation as a jazz club, Kajimura and Akiba lived in an apartment next to Yoshi’s, and he often worked 16 hours a day, six days a week. (Akiba and Kajimura later divorced and she eventually stepped back from Yoshi’s.)
“If something could be done by himself, Kaz would do it,” said Olaine. When a shipment of yakitori sticks were too long, rather than return them, Kajimura decided to trim them in the back shed with a circular saw—and cut off part of his finger. “When he got to the hospital, the doctors asked where his finger was, and it was back on the ground with the yakitori sticks,” said Olaine. Hori, the chef, wrapped the finger in ice and rushed it over to the hospital, where doctors reattached it. Within a few days, Kajimura was back at work.
Kajimura literally kept the doors open and lights on. In 1997, when the club expanded to a 300-seat venue next to the freight-train tracks in Oakland’s Jack London Square, he oversaw the extensive soundproofing and hand-built all of the tables. “Kaz literally was Yoshi’s,” said Olaine. “Yoshie’s spirit and vibe was what the club emanated, and Kaz’s work ethic and manic don’t-give-up ethos was what kept Yoshi’s going.”
Kajimura insisted on creating an elegant, welcoming experience for audiences and artists alike, a space far from a smoky jazz basement—and insisted on building it himself.
Legends and students
Kajimura’s efforts enabled the club to grow into a world-class music venue—and a first stage for generations of local musicians. “Running a jazz club is such a difficult endeavor, and Kaz was one of the very few who turned it into an institution that people felt really invested in,” said Andrew Gilbert, a journalist who has written about jazz since the early 1990s.
Kajimura placed Yoshi’s in a Bay Area jazz tradition, hiring local notables like Walid Rahman, former doorman of Keystone Korner, San Francisco’s beloved jazz club of the 1970s, to run the music room. He gave hundreds of Oakland and Berkeley jazz-band students a chance to play on the same stage as jazz pros; for one class of musicians at Edna Brewer Middle School, their concert at Yoshi’s led to them being recorded for a scene in Pixar’s movie “Soul,” about a middle-school band teacher.
For 50 years, Yoshi’s has been a space for audiences to hear jazz artists: international stars anchoring a West Coast tour, locals playing an album release, students dreaming of what a future in music could be.
By 2021, Kajimura was starting to show signs of dementia, and he stepped back from the club. For the last couple of years, Kajimura lived in a care home. He would have a glass of Chardonnay with dinner and listen to piano, which Holland would play for him and other residents.
“Music was part of his life until the very last day,” said Yoshi’s general manager Hal Campos, whom Kajimura referred to as his son. “He loved that.”
In Kajimura’s last hours, Campos played Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders for him in his room. By that point, Kajimura couldn’t speak anymore. But he could still listen to the music.