Life and Leisure

Akiyoshi promises Asian accents at concert

By Gan Tian (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-12 08:02

Japanese musician Toshiko Akiyoshi has promised her Chinese fans that her jazz concerts in Beijing and Shanghai will have some Asian elements.

The pianist will use the nogaku and gagaku, two styles of classical Japanese music, as preludes to each melody, before switching to pure jazz for the main part.

She will also try to use traditional Chinese instruments, the erhu (two-stringed fiddle) and guzheng (Chinese zither), in her performances. Audiences can expect to be treated to a jazz version of the Sichuan folk melody Love Song in Kangding (Kangding Qingge).

The artist will perform with the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, which she founded in 1973, with the help of Lew Tabackin, an American jazz musician to whom she is now married.

The orchestra has won many Grammy nominations and has been active in New York for years. Akiyoshi was also nominated several times as an arranger.

Tabackin, a flutist and saxophonist, as well as her daughter Monday Michiru, a famous film and television singer, will also lend their talents.

Akiyoshi was born in Shenyang, Liaoning province, in 1929. She studied piano at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music.

She says her concerts in Beijing and Shanghai are bound to stir up nostalgia for her birthplace.

She went back to Japan in 1946, where there was an active jazz scene. In 1953, when American jazz music impresario and producer Norman Granz made his JATP (Jazz At The Philharmonic) tour of Japan, Akiyoshi was spotted by the legendary Oscar Peterson. He told Granz she was "the greatest female jazz pianist" he had ever heard.

Later she was admitted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the United States.

Her experimental performances have greatly enriched jazz culture. Akiyoshi was one of the first musicians to include Asian elements in jazz, challenging a long-held notion that it belongs only to the Western stage.

China Daily