Hiromi, interviewed by Rick Beato

YouTube:

In this interview, I sit down with Japanese piano virtuoso Hiromi to talk about her playing, her influences, and her approach to improvisation. We cover her career, her unique style, and what drives her as a musician.

Hiromi is AWESOME!

Hiromi's Sonicwonder - Live from Jazz à Vienne Festival (2024) | Qwest TV

From the YouTube page:

The Japanese pianist Hiromi matches spontaneity, technique and communication in her sets, possessing the ultimate in serious intent and lightening humor. As is increasingly the case with many artists nowadays, Hiromi is finding fresh routes. With Sonicwonder she’s now heading up an electronically-flecked quartet that also includes dazzling New York trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, Hadrien Feraud (bass) and Gene Coye (drums).

The Vienne stage sits in the midst of a vast outdoor amphitheater, dwarfed until Hiromi exudes her intimate communication skills, fully inhabiting this potentially inhibiting space. But now we can view the entire 75 minute set on Qwest TV anyway, close-up and sonically pristine. Hiromi always solos joyfully, emitting palpable pleasure and wonderment on her visage, throwing the energy of her entire body into keyboard runs that alternate between crystal detail and devilish power. She moves between acoustic and a pair of Nord keyboards, the smallest of which perches on her piano lid. Her bandmates are slowly invited to reveal their abilities, with O’Farrill awarded an equal place beside Hiromi, showing off his trumpet eloquence. He hardly uses a mute, choosing to play with an open crackle, spraying fireflies directly into space. Bass (from Paris) and drums (from Chicago) deliberately adopt more of a supporting, structural role. Hiromi toys with retro synth-bass vamps, the funk rising up, but then she’ll rein back in to the delicate flow of her acoustic, altering the mood mid-tune.

– Martin Longley

Blue Giant

With English subtitles:

Kevin Nguyen, Jazz anime Blue Giant hits all the high notes, The Verge, Oct. 7, 2023.

The setup of Blue Giant is familiar anime territory: a young boy from a small town moves to Tokyo to pursue his dream. This boy, Dai, is a saxophone obsessive. He practices all day under a bridge, honking and warbling until he wears out his reed. Naturally, Dai wants to be the greatest jazz musician in the world.

For all his audacious ambition, Blue Giant is largely restrained. The movie focuses on the trio that forms the band — and even shifts its attention away from Dai at around the halfway mark. There’s also Sawabe, a savvy and smug pianist who knows how the club performance circuit operates. And then there’s Dai’s roommate, Tamada, a high school friend who improbably becomes the band’s rhythm section after trying the drums just once. They decide to form JASS, a name that, strangely, no one bats an eye at.

As JASS, they practice, they perform, they get better. Much of the film’s success hinges on the music being excellent — which it absolutely is. This isn’t the jukebox roulette of the Cowboy Bebop. Blue Giant has a legit soundtrack composed by Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, who does a compelling homage to the American sax legends of the ’60s. It’s less the jazz of cool sophistication but one of bravado and squeaky high notes. Think of the muscular brass of Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus or John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (probably the record the film’s title most strongly evokes).

Not to mention the fact that Sonny Rollins famously practiced on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1959 and then came out with an album entitled The Bridge.

The stage dynamics of the trio are a thrill when they come together, as the three of them get into harmony. As the film progresses, these sequences get more ecstatic, more abstract. Swirls of color, brushes with the cosmic, an attempt to go sublime. I’m at a loss for words to describe how much fun these sequences are. I guess I’ll just go with… “hot” and “intense”?

There's more at the link. 

As for Hiromi, I've got some posts about her, and an article at 3 Quarks Daily: Sukiyaki and beyond: Hiromi Uehara, music, war and peace, Chick Corea, and others.

Hiromi Uehara @ 3 Quarks Daily

My latest post at 3 Quarks Daily is about the Japanese pianist and composer, Hiromi Uehara:

Sukiyaki and beyond: Hiromi Uehara, music, war and peace, Chick Corea, and others

I don’t know how I first discovered her – this post originally went up in 2010. It had to have been on YouTube. But why did I click on one of her videos? I don’t know. Perhaps it was nothing more than that she is Japanese. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did. She’s phenomenal.

Here she is playing a jazz standard, “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” considerably reworked in a contemporary vein.

Hiromi plays Beethoven – but what would HE think about it?

"Ue wo muite arukou" 50 years later

I've been thinking about how culture is remix. Old stuff is constantly being repurposed, recontextualized, recovered, and redone: REMIX. This post from September 2010 is a single example, a song that I knew in my youth by the odd name of "Sukiyaki."

Back in 1961 Kyu Sakamoto had a hit in Japan with a wistful ballad called "Ue wo muite arukou."

It quickly became an international hit, more often than not being known as "Sukiyaki," the name given to it in the English-speaking world. The song has nothing whatever to do with sukiyaki, but ... it got covered in instrumental and vocal versions and has been recorded ever since. Here's two recent versions. An acoustic ballad by Kina Grannis, sung in Japanese:

Here's an instrumental version by an astonishing young pianist, Hiromi Uehara:

This version completely reconceptualizes the tune. From this version you'd hardly guess that the song started as a wistful ballad. I also suspect that that Uehara wanted to reclaim the song from all those really crappy instrumental versions that are out there.