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 largeepoch game, 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.
For years, economists have been developing a system of “true cost accounting” based on the growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures.
Neil Gostling, a paleobiologist at the University of Southampton in England, listens to these aspersions and laughs. “Eighty-three years later, the idea persists that dodos were slow, fat, useless balls of feathers that blundered into their own demise,” he said. “The fact is that the birds were fast, agile and, before being wiped out, had been doing their thing and doing it incredibly well for about 12 million years.”
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.
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