Kiyoshi Maejima was 14 when he first picked up a guitar. Soon he was playing hooky from his judo class to sneak off and practice the jazz riffs that his big brother had shown him. A few years later, he was heading up to Tokyo from Shizuoka to attend music school.

After three years of chord progressions and arrangements, he traveled to Okinawa for a three-month vacation and ended up staying three years. "The bands in Tokyo at that time seemed cold and soulless, but I was blown away by the power of the rock I heard being played in Okinawa," he recalls.

By the time he returned to Tokyo, he was ready to earn his living as a session musician. With the money he eventually made from his new job, he was able to start traveling overseas. He frequently visited America and Europe for a month or more at a time and often joined the famous Blues and Jazz Sessions in London in the '60s. As his appreciation and understanding of music deepened, he started to lose his appetite for his rent-paying commercial gigs. He wanted to focus on his own style. His solution was to open a bar.