Peter Cat — Reinspired | オ・エム | Otacílio Melgaço's Jazzy Experiments In Tokyo — {Otacílio Melgaço} [duration​ 35:46] by Otacílio Melgaço, released 02 October 2026

1. Peter Cat — R e i n s p i r e d | オ・エム | Otacílio Melgaço's Jazzy Experiments In Tokyo — (Otacílio Melgaço)

P E T E R C A T — R E I N S P I R E D | オ・エム |
O T A C Í L I O M E L G A Ç O 'S J A Z Z Y E X P E R I M E N T S I N T O K Y O —

ピーターキャット ― 再創造 | オ・エム |
オタシリオ・メルガソのジャズ的実験、東京にて —

[Pītā Kyatto — Saisōzō | オ・エム |
Otashirio Merugaso no jazu-teki jikken, Tōkyō nite —]

Suite in Sixteen Movements:

I- Hear The Wind Swing

II- Pin's Jazz Ball

III- Straight Or Chaser (Wild And Cheap)

IV- Hard Bopper Wonderland and the Post-End of the World (Under the Aegis of a Certain Cat's Smiling)

V- No Jazzin' Mood

VI- Dance Trance Prance

VII- South of the Boredom, West of the Fun

VIII- The Wind-Up Beat Chronicle

IX- Sputnik Jazz-Chart

X- Kafka, for sure

XI- After Lark

XII- 1-Clue-84

XIII- Colorless Tsukuru Takane and His Years of Blues-grimage

XIV- Chillin' Commendatore

XV- Tokyo and Its Uncertain Walls of Sound

XVI- The Tale of Chaos (Kah-Ooh!)

Recorded live at THE CATACOMB | CRM-114, Tokyo/Japan, before an invited audience.

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration ​35:46​] all rights reserved

The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

• "There are stories that do not end when a place disappears. Some remain as a kind of living memory, waiting for someone to pass through them once again — and make them come into being in another configuration.

In 1974, in Tokyo, Haruki Murakami and his wife, Yoko Takahashi, opened a small jazz bar called Peter Cat, first in the basement at 2-11-14 Minamicho, Kokubunji, and later at 1-7-12 Sendagaya. Its name inspired by the couple’s pet cat. Before discovering himself to be a writer, Murakami spent years behind the bar, listening to and playing records, welcoming musicians, and living, day after day, the experience of jazz. The club closed in 1981, but the name Peter Cat remained associated with that singular passage between music, listening, and creation.

Decades later, a Brazilian musician arrives in the same metropolis to play jazz as well.

His name is Otacílio Melgaço.

Alongside two Japanese instrumentalists — Mr. Tsukazaki & Mr. Minami, respectively a double bassist & a drummer — he establishes with them a musical experience born of the encounter between three trajectories, three ways of listening, and three ways of inhabiting music. Yet under Melgaço’s conception and cartography, under his baton.

It is within this context that Pītā Kyatto — Saisōzō | オ・エム | Otashirio Merugaso no jazu-teki jikken, Tōkyō nite — comes into being.

The appellation is no coincidence. It is a direct reference to Murakami’s former club and, at the same time, a tribute. But this is not an attempt to reconstruct Peter Cat, nor to reproduce its history. What matters is what may happen when a past experience encounters a different body, a different place, and a different time.

The mention of Haruki, however, does not end with the denomination of the album. It extends throughout the music itself. The central piece is a Suite in sixteen movements, and the soubriquet of each segment is a wordplay on one of Murakami’s book titles, following the author’s literary trajectory from his earliest oeuvre to his most recent novel.

The Peter Cat of Haruki is therefore the point of departure. What happens in Tokyo, many years later, is something else.

A Brazilian musician plays disenthralled music…in what was once the village and fortress of Edo…with two Nipponese resonant performers (handpicked, highly articulate and, on top of that, old friends of O・M). Deliberately, he gives his experience the moniker of that former jazz venue. The gesture contains a kind of temporal displacement: the monicker crosses decades, changes its place without ever leaving Japan's capital, and comes to designate effervescent sonorities that could not have existed in that first Peter Cat.

This is why ピーターキャット ― 再創造 | オ・エム | オタシリオ・メルガソのジャズ的実験、東京にて — does not simply mean ´inspired again´. The inspiration is taken up in order to be transformed. What returns is not the past itself, but the possibility of creating from it.

In this sense, Peter Cat is less a tribute to what once was than a question cast into the present: what might emerge when a sonic memory encounters new executors, new relationships, and a new experience of listening?

The answer lies in the record itself.

The original Peter Cat belongs to Murakami’s history. This Peter Cat belongs to the encounter between Otacílio Melgaço and his two Japanese partners.

A name crosses time.

A reference is taken up anew.

And, in Tokyo, it becomes music once again. The most surprising, exuberant, and breathtaking!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"If Peter Cat is the point of departure, ピーターキャット ― 再創造 | オ・エム | オタシリオ・メルガソのジャズ的実験、東京にて — is the gesture of transfiguration!

The musical universe associated with Haruki Murakami encompasses figures such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Pepper, and Lee Morgan. This constellation belongs to the history and sensibility of the original Peter Cat — a musical world in which jazz became an essential part of Murakami’s life and, later, of his literary imagination.

Otacílio Melgaço, however, begins elsewhere.

His audible references lie closer to the avant-garde, to free jazz, and to the more exploratory territories of contemporary improvisation. From there, he expands the music, allowing futuristic and, at times, psychedelic elements to enter the work. Jazz ceases to be a fixed language and is metamorphosed, instead, into a field of experimentation: a space in which timbre, texture, rhythm, silence, noise, and (it is worth reiterating) freedom can — and must — continually alter the course of the composition.

Melgaço plays piano, toy piano, fender rhodes, organ, keyboards; double bass, electric bass; guitar, electric shamisen; theremin; turntablism; whistling, whispers & cries; plus sound effects. This multiplicity is not merely instrumental. Each sonic artefact opens a different avenue of listening; each sonic identity redirects the complex ´opus´ toward another dominion.

The work takes the guise of a Suite in sixteen movements. Rather than following a linear or foreseeable progression from one point to another, it unfolds like a kaleidoscope — a mosaic of forms, densities, and atmospheres. Each movement is a fragment of the larger work, yet each possesses its own niche, its own internal logic, and its own way of displacing the listener’s perspective.

The composition is by Melgaço, and his pre-conceived structures provide part of the map. But the map remains open.

Leading to a Power Trio, Melgaço and a pair of collaborators — the astounding Kiyoaki Tsukazaki and Shigekuni Minami — improvise freely, all three of them. At other moments, the Japanese musicians enter structures previously conceived by Melgaço, responding to them. Thus, composition and improvisation cease to be opposing reference points. They come to represent idiosyncratic ways of constructing the same piece.

The result is music that can be rigorously conceived and, simultaneously, stay unpredictable. Not many creators resolve this paradox. Melgaço resolves it with distinction!

It is in this space between silhouette and liberty that Peter Cat — reinspired | オ・エム | Otacílio Melgaço's Jazzy Experiments In Tokyo — finds its meaning.

The inspiration is not recovered as nostalgia; it is taken up again in order to be transubstantiated!

Murakami’s Peter Cat remains a historical landmark; Melgaço’s music carries that touchstone into entirely different latitudes and longitudes — shaped, therefore, by avant-garde experimentation, free improvisation, and an expanded conception of jazz.

The jazz that once inhabited Peter Cat becomes, here, the basis of departure for another experience: more anarchic, more radical, at times ´sci-fi´, at times lysergic, and always open to the risk of the instant.

From one movement to the next, the music alters its perspective.

Like a kaleidoscope, it rearranges its fragments with every turn.

Like a mosaic, it preserves the differences that compose the whole.

And although its estimated inspiration lies in the past, its sound belongs entirely to the present. Or rather — and in the case of Otacílio Melgaço — to the most compelling of becomings always-already presentified." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I- Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and translator, born in Kyoto in 1949. He grew up in Kobe and studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo. Before becoming a full-time writer, he ran a small jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Kokubunji, Tokyo, with his wife, Yoko Takahashi, from 1974 to 1981.

His literary career began in 1979 with Hear the Wind Sing, the first volume of what became known as the “Trilogy of the Rat.” His fiction is characterized by an unusual interweaving of the everyday and the surreal, solitude and desire, memory and disappearance, while jazz, Western literature, and popular music frequently form part of its cultural landscape. Among his best-known works are Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Murakami is also a prolific translator of American literature, having translated works by authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, and J. D. Salinger into Japanese. His novels have been translated into numerous languages and have made him one of the most internationally recognized contemporary Japanese writers;

II- Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E minor (Op. 28, No. 4) appears incidentally in Otacílio Melgaço's Jazzy Experiments In Tokyo;

III- <<There is yet another layer to the story of PETER CAT — REINSPIRED —.

For the visual identity of the project, Otacílio Melgaço adopted and reworked the image of the Cheshire Cat originally drawn by Arthur Rackham for his celebrated 1907 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Rackham’s Cheshire Cat — the enigmatic, grinning creature suspended between appearance and disappearance — belongs to one of the most remarkable visual interpretations of Carroll’s Wonderland.

Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was one of the great British illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration. Born in London, he became renowned for his richly imaginative drawings and paintings for literary and fairy-tale works, developing a distinctive visual language in which the marvelous, the grotesque, the dreamlike, and the uncanny frequently coexist. His major books include Rip Van Winkle, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Ring of the Nibelung, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His 1907 Alice was particularly significant: after the original copyright expired, Rackham was commissioned to create an entirely new visual interpretation of a book whose identity had long been inseparable from John Tenniel’s famous illustrations.

The choice is therefore far from accidental.

The old Peter Cat of Haruki Murakami was itself associated with the Cheshire Cat. Contemporary recollections of the club describe the matchbooks distributed when Peter Cat opened in 1974 as bearing the smiling Cheshire Cat together with the name “Peter Cat.”

Melgaço thus performs a gesture within a gesture.

The cat that once accompanied Murakami’s Peter Cat is traced back to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and to Rackham’s extraordinary reinterpretation of it. Melgaço then takes that already displaced image and displaces it once more, altering it for a new Peter Cat, in a different moment, under a different musical conception.

The trajectory is almost a small history of reinspiration in itself:

Carroll → Rackham → Murakami → Melgaço

Each passage preserves something of what came before while changing its function.

In Carroll, the Cheshire Cat belongs to a world in which logic is constantly destabilized, identities shift, appearances deceive, and the rules of ordinary reality no longer hold. In Rackham, that world acquires a darker, more enigmatic visual dimension; his interpretation of Alice was precisely an act of reimagining a canonical text through another artistic sensibility.

In Murakami’s Peter Cat, the Cheshire Cat became part of the visual memory of a jazz bar in Tokyo.

And in Melgaço’s PETER CAT — REINSPIRED —, the image returns once again — no longer merely as an emblem of a vanished club, but as a sign of Otacilian metamorphosis itself.

The cat has already crossed worlds.

It crossed from literature into illustration, from illustration into the identity of a jazz club, and from that club into a new musical work.

What Melgaço does is not simply to reproduce the cat. He makes it "return altered".

That is precisely the logic of REINSPIRED: not the preservation of an inherited image, but its passage through another body, another imagination, another time.

The Cheshire Cat smiles from the branch.

Peter Cat waits somewhere between memory and invention.

And now, in Tokyo, the cat returns — changed once again (in the boldest and most challenging way), and carrying the mesmerizing Melgacian music with it.>> — Note by C. Campbell

IV- <<THE CATACOMB | CRM-114 is a nomadic space dedicated to sui generis spectacles in the principal city of the Land of the Rising Sun. From time to time, it will occupy a new location for an indefinite period—and so on. It is not a publicly disclosed facility. It is open to invited guests. Its founders, connected to the world of fashion and design, have long-standing ties to Otacílio, who was asked to come and inaugurate this "ghost-ship club."

PETER CAT — REINSPIRED — オ・エム — OTACÍLIO MELGAÇO'S JAZZY EXPERIMENTS IN TOKYO — was part of the repertoire the musician performed on that celebrated occasion. Specially devised for the commemorative circumstance. The musician who, as is well known, very rarely makes an effort to be on a stage —and when it happens, he calls them "Apparitions"—.

The name, THE CATACOMB | CRM-114, was suggested by O・M, blending a certain fascination the Brazilian harbors for the Manhattan-born film director Stanley Kubrick and his captivation [by Melgaço, not Kubrick] with the catacombs of Paris and Rome. Otacílio let himself be carried away by the imagination of a Tokyo that also possessed them.

The term originates from Ancient Greek, derived from the combination of katá ("down" or "below") and kýmbe ("cavity," "basin," or "valley"). In Late Latin, the expression evolved into ad catacumbas, literally meaning "in the valley" or "near the cavities."

Thus, it is an act of moving downward, into (in the words of O・M) an "antrum, sinus, calyx" —going underground. It is less on a mortuary prism and more about an immersion into the heart of the/that earth, seeking the depth of a root that has diverged from the mainstream—from a surface life prone to superficiality—to propose, culturally, the off the wall, the extramundane and the unheard-of.>> — Note by P. S. Paz

V- <<There is a character created by Haruki Murakami who spoke to kitties. It is Mr. Satoru Nakata, one of the protagonists of the acclaimed novel "Kafka on the Shore". Considering the sonic creator of "Peter Cat — Reinspired", it seems to me that both share this trait.>> — Note by K.Tamura ;)

…for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source…

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Between two parentheses…
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète… Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic…Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism…are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies…
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)

• P.S.P.

Hear more here:
soundcloud.com/otaciliomelgaco