NEA Jazz Master Toshiko Akiyoshi

BIO: Over the course of a seven-decade career, NEA Jazz Master Toshiko Akiyoshi has made a unique and vital contribution to the art of jazz. In 1929, at the time of her birth, Akiyoshi’s Japanese family resided in Manchuria, China where she studied piano from a young age. At the end of World War II in 1945, Akiyoshi’s family endured hardship and moved back to Japan. To get access to a piano, she took her first job as a musician, playing in a dance-hall band. She was discovered by pianist Oscar Peterson while he was on a Jazz at the Philharmonic tour of Japan. In 1953, Peterson encouraged producer Norman Granz to record her. While still in Japan, she made her recording debut with Peterson’s rhythm section (Herbie Ellis, Ray Brown and J.C. Heard) which was released in 1954 in both Japan and the U.S. This album led to a full scholarship (including a plane ticket) to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Akiyoshi moved to New York in 1959, playing at Birdland, the Village Gate, the Five Spot, and the Half Note. In 1972 she then moved to Los Angeles with her second husband, saxophonist/flutist Lew Tabackin. The following year, the couple formed the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra Featuring Lew Tabackin. According to Akiyoshi’s biography on Mezzrow’s site, their big band was considered one of the most important in the nation/world during the 1970s and 1980s). In 1976, the band placed first in the DownBeat Critics’ Poll, and Akiyoshi’s album Long Yellow Road was named best jazz album of the year by Stereo Review. In 1982, (comma added) Akiyoshi moved to New York and re-formed her band with New York-based musicians; they debuted to critical acclaim at Carnegie Hall as part of the 1983 Kool Jazz Festival.

Akiyoshi has recorded over 60 albums as a leader, three as a solo pianist and over 20 with full jazz orchestra. In 2007, she received the nation’s highest jazz honor (National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master), 14 Grammy Award nominations 16 DownBeat Readers’ Poll Awards, and 13 DownBeat Critics’ Poll Awards. In Japan, Akiyoshi has received numerous awards, and has been honored twice by the Emperor of Japan. She has written an autobiography and is the subject of the documentary, Jazz is My Native Language.

“…a level of compositional and orchestral ingenuity that made her one of perhaps two or three composer-arrangers in jazz whose name could seriously be mentioned in the company of Duke Ellington, Eddie Sauter and Gil Evans.”–Harrison, Max; Fox, Charles; Thacker, Eric; Nicholson, Stuart (2000). The Essential Jazz Records Volume 2: Modernism to Postsmodernism. Continuum. p. 226