When Takanori Sugauchi's conservatory was destroyed in an earthquake, he didn't get angry - he got to work. The night of January 16, 1995, had nearly rolled over to the dawn of the following morning, and Takanori Sugauchi was still doing paperwork at his home. Sugauchi, president of Koyo Conservatory, in Kobe, Japan, would be meeting with Berklee's Associate Vice President for International Programs Larry Monroe later that day. Monroe was in Tokyo at the time and would be traveling to Kobe to discuss the possible admission of Sugauchi's institution into the Berklee International Network, a global alliance of music schools that was founded by Berklee in 1993. Finally, with the forms in immaculate order, Sugauchi shut the lights off. He had a big day ahead of him. He had no idea how big.

At 5:46 a.m., on January 17, 1995, what would become known as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, struck south-central Japan. Though damage reached several major cities, including Kyoto and Osaka, devastation was mostly confined to Kobe. Almost 4,600 people were killed and almost 15,000 were injured by the jolt, whose force was recorded at 7.3 on the Richter scale. In just 20 seconds, the cosmopolitan harbor city of Kobe crumbled - the major quake, the first ever to directly hit a Japanese urban area, razed more than 74,000 buildings and partially destroyed more than 55,000 others. Sugauchi's home was near the mountains and was spared the destruction suffered by the unlucky buildings along the coastal fault line - buildings such as the Koyo Conservatory.

"I had a very eerie feeling that something had happened to it," says Sugauchi, through his translator and foreign affairs representative Maya Masaki. "Of course, what I immediately did was check the building."

Sadly, Sugauchi's dread was justified. The south side of the building had been stripped of its skin - walls, floors, staircases - but had retained its skeleton of beams. The north side of the building wasn't as fortunate. It was wooden and had no steel supports to leave behind. It had splintered to pieces. For Sugauchi, it was time to rebuild. Maybe.

"The first thought I had, quite honestly, was that it might not be worth it," he says. "But in the end, it wasn't only my will. A greater force motivated me."

There wasn't time to lose. In education, continuity is key, and the longer Koyo was inoperable, the greater its risk of losing some of its 300 students.

"In order to run a school," Sugauchi says, "you can't wait. You can't shut down and try to catch up."

Of course, Koyo did have to shut down for a time, but with the foundation of the south side of the building intact, it wasn't long before classes were in session again in that wing of the building.

"We were probably one of the first buildings renovated," Sugauchi says.

But the north side offered nothing to work with, and since Sugauchi would essentially be building a new structure from scratch, construction was further stalled by the obtaining of the requisite permits and licenses - the same documents for which tens of thousands of other Kobe residents were applying. It would be about a year from the time of the quake before Koyo was running in its entirety. The delay, frustrating as it was, offered Sugauchi something he rarely had as the busy head administrator of a music school: time to think.

"After the earthquake," says Sugauchi, "I had a lot of time to consider my life and what I wanted to do in the future. Kobe has always had a healthy jazz culture - it was always one of our trademarks - and just to be motivated for the future, I wanted to activate the jazz community, and what Berklee represents helped motivate me."

Sugauchi first visited Berklee in 1985 - he and Brass Department Associate Professor Tiger Okoshi are close friends - and within a few years, the college accepted its first Koyo student. He says Berklee has always been a college that has inspired Koyo's approach to pedagogy.

"You have a school, and you want to keep advancing and improving the curriculum and the overall system," says Sugauchi. "Along the lines of those goals, Berklee has always been there as a kind of model."

Koyo guitar and ear training teacher Akihito Fuse agrees. He joined the faculty 14 years ago and says Berklee has influenced what he does in his classroom.

"It's good to know the Berklee training methods," he says. "It helps me teach at Koyo. It's great for us to have such good relations with Berklee."

Berklee's Monroe finally made it to Kobe in the August following the quake. The city was rebounding but far from restored, and Koyo's north side was still months away from functionality. But what left the most lasting impression on Monroe wasn't the damage, but Sugauchi's determination: When Koyo was ready to sign on, Berklee would be ready to welcome it to the BIN community.

"I thought, 'If this guy can survive all this,'" says Monroe, "'then he's the kind of person we want working with Berklee.'"

But reopening Koyo, while significant, wasn't enough for Sugauchi. He was still in search of the means to not only activate Kobe's jazz community, but also, in some small way, to revitalize Kobe residents as a whole. Then, on a visit to Boston, he saw a student concert at the Berklee Performance Center.

"That planted a seed to do something to cheer up the citizens," Sugauchi says.

It was this seed that grew into the Phoenix Jazz Festival, the first of which was held the very year of the earthquake. The festival includes performances by Koyo faculty, Berklee faculty and students, and a variety of well-known feature acts, and is the culminating event of more than a week of Berklee-Koyo collaborations. These include scholarship auditions, during which Berklee awards close to $70,000 to promising young musicians; a concert by a Berklee student ensemble at the Hamakaze-no-Ie orphanage for children whose parents were killed in the earthquake (a portion of the ticket sales from the Phoenix Jazz Festival also go to this facility); and clinics led by Berklee teachers and translated by Koyo staff and faculty. But as important as what the festival offers is what the festival represents: a city risen from the rubble, a school prepared to get on with what it has always done best and what the rumble of an earthquake could only drown out temporarily: music.

Voice Department Associate Professor Donna McElroy has a lot of ground to cover in her three clinics, and her lectures will have to be filtered through her translator, Maya Masaki, who is also a singer. McElroy plans to get to vocal styles and improvisation, but she has to devote the first clinic to technique, upon which everything else depends. And, as a vocalist, you can't have technique if you can't breathe - the right way.

"Stand up," McElroy says to her class. "I want you to put your fingers right here, right under your rib cage, not your stomach. It's right where your bra is going across the front."

One of her few male students is, not surprisingly, having some trouble finding the spot, and McElroy runs over to coach. She presses her fingers into his abdomen. Although she can always rely on Masaki's help, McElroy tries to communicate directly with her students when her Japanese vocabulary allows.

Say, "Moshi! Moshi!"

"Moshi, Moshi," he says, mildly.

"You can do better than that, honey," says McElroy. "Again. Big time."

"Moshi! Moshi!"

"Right there. Feel that muscle? That's the muscle I want you to be thinking about as you're warming up. Maya, ask him to call a taxi." And she does.

"Takushi!"

The class just cracks up.

"The muscle you feel right now going guh-guh-guh-guh," says McElroy, "is the diaphragmatic muscle. That's the one you should be in touch with. It should be expanding and contracting the whole time you're singing."

Later, McElroy is explaining the importance of breath control.

"How many of you are performing?" she asks.

She's met with shy silence.

"Nobody's actually performing?"

Finally, a hand goes up, belonging to the same student McElroy worked with earlier in the session. With Masaki's help, McElroy gets his story.

"I sing in a rock band," he says.

"So, you do a lot of jumping around, banging your head and stuff like that," McElroy says. "It's a rock band. You can't be standing around. You've got to be moving, and breath control will help you keep your stamina. Do you have vocal problems at the end of the gig?"

"Not yet. Not really."

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen," he says.

"Yeah, what a sweet age. I didn't have any problems either when I was 19," McElroy says, gazing away wistfully. "Oh, sorry, let's get back to work."

Later in the week, many of the students are packed into the auditorium in Koyo's Nada Hall. It's time for the jam session, where the clinic participants get to take the stage under the supervision of Berklee faculty. Some of the students have arrived early and are sitting up close. They're the ones with their guitars out of their cases and on their laps, plugging their mouthpieces in their horns, or pattering out paradiddles on the seats in front of them. When the call goes out for volunteers, their hands will go straight up, straight away. Behind them, the students seem more bashful, less eager for the spotlight. But when you're needed, you're needed.

"She plays alto sax," says Ear Training Associate Professor Scott deOgburn, pointing toward a young woman trying to shrink in her seat. "I remember her."

But she holds out, so the funk starts without her. A quartet of trumpet players has lined up front and center, and deOgburn runs up to make it a quintet. Nearby, lines have formed behind the drums and guitars, so that students are literally waiting in the wings for their turn to join in. One of the guitarists is so scorching on his strings that Guitar Professor Jim Kelly dashes out fanning a towel - this kid definitely needs to be cooled down. Another student has a deadpan face, but the groove she transmits through her fingers and into her keyboard is so infectious that Larry Monroe and deOgburn can't help bowing to her. At the corner of the stage, Donna McElroy is swaying with her circle of vocalists. And, finally, the crowd on stage makes room for its first woodwind - a young alto saxophonist who's tired of just watching.

After the jam session, the Berklee faculty band does a set of its own. It's a rehearsal, actually. The Phoenix Jazz Festival is the day after tomorrow.

From the back seats to the balconies, Portopia Hall is filled. Emcee and vocalist Geila Zilkha steps into the lights, salutes the Phoenix Jazz Festival audience - "Komban wa!" - and introduces Berklee's student ensemble, which features bassist Jacob Karl Bertil Forslund, drummer Akira Nakamura, pianist Oliver Joel Rockberger, and vocalist Alisa Miles. The set features, among more traditional jazz pieces, Miles's r&b interpretation of John Lennon's "Imagine." Afterwards, Zilkha asks Miles for her thoughts about her visit to Japan.

"It's beautiful," Miles says. "I've enjoyed every minute of it....You are all such wonderful people, so open, so giving. I just love it."

The evening also includes performances by guitar virtuoso Katsumi Watanabe, the Koyo faculty band, and the headliner, the Makoto Ozone Trio. And just before Ozone plays, the Berklee faculty band has its own set - and a chance to say thank-you to its host with a special blues for the occasion, written by Larry Monroe and shouted out by Donna McElroy:

Kobe, Kobe, Kobe
Kobe is the place for me
Kobe, Kobe, Kobe
Kobe is the place for me
A little bit of heaven
A swinging city by the sea!

Alisa Miles