Over more than 20 years as a recording artist, the jazz piano phenomenon Hiromi has
shifted seamlessly from one spellbinding project to the next. In the process, she’s earned a
reputation as one of the most explosive live performers in jazz history and a global
ambassador for the art form. Her many triumphs include an NPR Tiny Desk Concert that
has racked up 2 million views; the opportunity to represent her native Japan with a
performance at the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo; 2024 winner for Best Music Score
for the animated feature film Blue Giant (Award of the Japanese Academy); and a
GRAMMY Award for a collaboration with fusion hero Stanley Clarke. Her artistry is — to
borrow a descriptor the New Yorker favored — “dazzling.”
Japan has produced an impressive assemblage of jazz pianists, from Toshiko Akiyoshi
and Makoto Ozone to Junko Onishi. And now, well into the change of the 21 st century, the
pianist/composer Hiromi Mihara is the latest in that line of amazing musicians. Ever since
the 2003 release of her debut Telarc CD, Another Mind, Hiromi has electrified audiences
and critics east and west, with a creative energy that encompasses and eclipses the
boundaries of jazz, classical and pop parameters, taking improvisation and composition to
new heights of complexity and sophistication. Her CD’s “Voice”, “Move”, “Alive” and
“Spark”, featured her critically acclaimed Trio Project, consisting of contrabass guitarist
Anthony Jackson (Steely Dan, Paul Simon, Michel Camilo, The O’Jays and Chick Corea)
and drummer Simon Phillips (Toto, The Who, Judas Priest, David Gilmour and Jack
Bruce) which is the music she will be performing tonight.
Born in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan on March 26, 1979, Hiromi’s piano lessons started
when she was six, and she performed her first recital at that age. Her first teacher, Noriko
Hikida, encouraged her to access both the intuitive and technical aspects of music. “Her
energy was always so high, and she was so emotional,” Hiromi says of Hikida. “When she
wanted me to play with a certain kind of dynamics, she wouldn’t say it with technical terms.
If the piece was something passionate, she would say, ‘Play red.’ Or if it was something
mellow, she would say, ‘Play blue.’ I could really play from my heart that way, and not just
from my ears.”
Hikida also exposed Hiromi to jazz and introduced her to the great pianists Erroll Garner
and Oscar Peterson. She enrolled in the Yamaha School of Music at age six and started to
write music at that time.
Hiromi moved to the United States in 1999, and she matriculated at the Berklee College of
Music in Boston, which extended her artistic sensibilities. “It expanded so much the way I
see music,” she says. “Some people dig jazz, some people dig classical music, some
people dig rock. Everyone is so concerned about who they like. They always say, ‘This guy
is the best,’ ‘No, this guy is the best.’ But I think everyone is great. I really don’t have
barriers to any type of music. I could listen to everything from metal to classical music to
anything else.”
Among her mentors at Berklee was the veteran jazz bassist/arranger Richard Evans, who
teaches arranging and orchestration. It was Evans who took Hiromi’s demo tape to his
friend and collaborator: the legendary pianist/bandleader Ahmad Jamal. “[Professor Evans]
really liked how I played,” Hiromi fondly recalled. “And Ahmad loved the demo – I couldn’t
believe it! He was very encouraging and supportive. He was an amazing human being.”
Evans co-produced her debut CD, Another Mind, with Jamal, who had also taken a
personal interest in Hiromi’s artistic development. “She is nothing short of amazing,” said
Jamal. “Her music, together with her overwhelming charm and spirit, causes her to soar to
unimaginable musical heights.” Another Mind was a critical success in North America and
in her native Japan, where the album shipped gold (100,000 units) and received the
Recording Industry Association of Japan’s (RIAJ) Jazz Album of the Year Award. Hiromi’s
astonishing debut was but a forecast of the shape of jazz to come.
Her second release, Brain, won the Horizon Award at the 2004 Surround Music Awards,
Swing Journal’s New Star Award, Jazz Life’s Gold Album, HMV Japan’s Best Japanese
Jazz Album and the Japan Music Pen Club’s Japanese Artist Award (the JMPC is a
classical/jazz journalists club). Brain was also named Album of the Year in Swing Journal’s
2005 Readers Poll. In 2006, Hiromi won Best Jazz Act at the Boston Music Awards and
the Guinness Jazz Festival’s Rising Star Award. She also claimed Jazzman of the Year,
Pianist of the Year and Album of the Year in Swing Journal’s Readers Poll for her 2006
release, Spiral. Hiromi’s winning streak continued with the release of Time Control in 2007
and Beyond Standard in 2008. Both releases featured Sonicbloom: her hand-picked group
that included guitarist Dave “Fuze” Fiuczynski, bassist Tony Grey and drummer Martin
Valihora.
Hiromi achieved a number of milestones in 2009. She recorded with pianist Chick Corea –
who she met in Japan when she was seventeen on Duet, a two-disc live recording of their
transcendent, transgenerational and transcultural duo concert in Tokyo. She also
appeared on bassist Stanley Clarke’s Heads Up International release, Jazz in the Garden,
which also featured former Chick Corea bandmate, drummer Lenny White.
In June of that same year, Hiromi simultaneously released two concert DVDs, both
recorded in Tokyo: Hiromi Live in Concert (recorded in December 2005) and Hiromi’s
Sonicbloom Live in Concert (recorded in December 2007). The former features the rhythm
section of Grey and Valihora, while the latter includes Fiuczynski’s incendiary fretwork.
In 2010, Hiromi released Place to Be, an impressive and intimate solo piano CD; her
evocative aural travelogue of the many places and spaces she visited around the world. “I
wanted to record the sound of my twenties for archival purposes,” she says. “I felt like the
people whom I met on the road during my twenties really helped me develop and mature
as a musician and as a person. So in addition to making a record that represented all of
these places that have inspired my music, I also wanted it to be a thank-you to those
people.”
She followed up Place to Be with a DVD, Hiromi Solo Live at Blue Note New York.
Recorded on August 20 and 21, 2010, at the Blue Note in New York City, the video
includes 11 originals and a special bonus feature with interview clips and performance
footage from some of Hiromi’s favorite cities around the world.
On her 2011 album, Voice, Hiromi’s goal was to capture people’s “inner voices” to create
what she called a “three-dimensional sound.” On that album, she assembled a trio that
included herself and two veteran players: contrabass guitarist Anthony Jackson and
drummer Simon Phillips. While Hiromi had played with Jackson prior to recording Voice,
she had never recorded an entire album with either him or Phillips, the latter who had been
recommended to her by legendary bassist Stanley Clarke, a mutual acquaintance.
Also in 2011, The Stanley Clarke Band CD, featuring Hiromi, won the GRAMMY ® Award
for Best Contemporary Jazz Album.
While on the road, Hiromi started writing music for the follow-up CD, Move, released in
2013. “Because I had been playing with Anthony and Simon for quite a bit, I just started to
understand their characteristics, and I could find a hidden gem in their playing,” she
explains. “There’s so much more to their playing. As a composer, I really wanted to write
the songs especially for them, and I wanted to extract the unique beauty of their playing.”
Move, like Voice, had an overriding theme, which Hiromi describes as “time in one day.”
“You wake up and go to work and then hang out,” she says. “The album is like a
soundtrack for a day.” That same year, she had several impressive placements in
DownBeat magazine’s 61 st Annual International Critics Poll, in the Jazz Artist, Piano,
Keyboard and Rising Star: Piano categories. In 2013, she performed at George Wein’s
Newport Jazz Festival and also performed there for the festival’s sixtieth anniversary in
2014.
Alive, released in 2014, heralded the return of The Trio Project, featuring Jackson and
Phillips. DownBeat magazine proclaimed the terrific triad as “one of the most exciting
groups working in any genre today.” On Alive, Phillips’ powerful, yet poetic percussion and
Jackson’s flowing, glow-in-the-dark basslines beautifully buoy and support Hiromi’s
ingenious and impassioned improvisations. Her evocative and expansive compositions
evoke the myriad moods and mysteries of life and reveal the soulful, syncopated simpatico
of her thrilling threesome.
