George Wein News

The 80-year-old jazz impresario George Wein rarely introduces performers at the many festival concerts he presents worldwide, but he made an exception for the trailblazing Japanese pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi at a special tribute celebrating the 50th anniversary of her arrival in the United States.

Wein recalled waiting at 2 a.m. with Lawrence Berk, founder of the Berklee College of Music, on a cold January morning in 1956 at Boston's airport to meet the plane carrying "this young lady coming all the way from Japan."

Wein didn't know what to expect — nothing had prepared him for a 26-year-old Japanese female bebop pianist — even though Akiyoshi had come to the U.S. with the endorsement of piano legend Oscar Peterson, who had discovered her playing in a Tokyo club during a 1952 tour and convinced producer Norman Granz to record her first album in Japan the following year using his own rhythm section.

"When she got off (the plane), I fell in love with her right away," Wein, the JVC Jazz Festival producer, told the audience at Thursday night's tribute concert at the Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan. "She's the most wonderful, beautiful person, talented, writes music, plays the piano. She married a wonderful guy, Lew Tabackin, the tenor saxophonist, and the two of them have become my closest friends."

Akiyoshi remembered feeling "very tired ... almost numb" that morning following her long journey from Tokyo in the days of pre-jet travel.

"I was nervous, I didn't know anyone, and I understood but couldn't speak English that well," said the pianist, in an interview a day after the concert. "It was a lot of excitement for me, a totally different environment, because there were no Japanese around Boston then like there are now."

That same evening, Wein took Akiyoshi to his Boston jazz club, Storyville, where she heard her main influence, bebop pianist Bud Powell, live for the first time. Until then she had only listened to his recordings back in Japan.

"It must have been karma that the first musician I heard in the U.S. was my mentor," said the 76-year-old Akiyoshi, who paid tribute to Powell in her solo piano program Thursday night by playing her own tune "Remembering Bud" and one of Powell's most famous compositions, "Tempus Fugit."

"He was the first pianist who came out of a horn player, Charlie Parker, and played quite differently from other pianists. He was a master at playing incredibly fast ... yet there was an immense vulnerability to his ballad playing."

Akiyoshi was soon playing several nights a week at Storyville. Wein presented her later that year at the Newport Jazz Festival, which he had founded two years earlier, and produced her first U.S. recordings for his jazz label. Akiyoshi was the first Japanese student to attend the Berklee College of Music, where today there are more than 300 Japanese enrolled, about 10 percent of the student body.

Akiyoshi became the first Japanese jazz musician to make a significant mark on the U.S. jazz scene, winning acclaim as a composer and arranger with the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, which garnered 14 Grammy nominations in its 30-year history.

Opening for Akiyoshi at Thursday's concert was 27-year-old Hiromi Uehara, a former Berklee student, who performed selections from her latest CD, "Spiral," full of odd meters, dense flurries of notes and chords, and sharp dynamic contrasts.

Hiromi, as she is known professionally, said that whenever she encounters problems, they seem much more manageable when she thinks about what Akiyoshi had to go through 50 years earlier.

"I would really like to thank her because when she went to the States 50 years ago she opened the door for Japanese jazz people," Hiromi told the audience as she dedicated a tune, "Green Tea Farm," inspired by her hometown of Shizuoka, to Akiyoshi.

Akiyoshi's mentoring role was also cited by Tomoko Ohno, the other young Japanese female pianist performing Thursday night. Ohno credited Akiyoshi with helping her hook up with the veteran saxophonist Frank Wess, a mainstay of Count Basie's big band and later Akiyoshi's Jazz Orchestra, to play several duets that evening.

Three years ago, Akiyoshi disbanded her jazz orchestra because she wanted to focus more on her piano playing rather than on composing and arranging.

"I always considered myself a pianist, and all my compositions came from my experience as a pianist," she said. "I felt this was the time for me to get back to the piano. I was a much better technician when I made my first recordings when I was 23, but I think musically I'm much more mature and a much better jazz musician today."

Akiyoshi is particularly excited because she is now getting a chance to play more solo concerts.

"I like playing solo," she said. "You can't really rest as you can in a trio, but you have 100 percent control."

On Thursday night, Akiyoshi introduced one standard for the first time to her solo repertoire, "Sweet Lorraine," a tune that holds special significance.

Akiyoshi, whose family moved from Manchuria back to Japan at the end of World War II, was classically trained, but as a teenager she began playing in dance halls in the resort city of Beppu in 1946. One night, a record collector invited her to listen to some jazz records and she heard pianist Teddy Wilson's version of "Sweet Lorraine."

"That got my hooked on jazz," she said.

On Dec. 4, to celebrate her 60 years in music, she will be performing solo, in small groups, and reuniting her Jazz Orchestra for a concert at Tokyo's Suntory Hall. Her orchestra will be performing with traditional Japanese taiko and tsuzumi drummers to play some of her compositions that blend Japanese influences with bebop.

Akiyoshi closed Thursday's concert with a solo version of a composition she originally wrote for her big band, titled "Hope," the last movement of her extended suite "Hiroshima: Rising From the Abyss," dedicated to victims of the 1945 atomic-bomb blast. Akiyoshi found the tune with its message of hope springing from tragedy and destruction a particularly appropriate choice to close her regular Monday-night big-band performances at New York's Birdland jazz club following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"We all should have hope," she said, before playing the encore.