Who is Toshiko Akiyoshi? Meet the Japanese pianist and composer who transformed…

July 12, 2024, 2:23 p.m. | Updated: July 12, 2024, 2:27 p.m.

All about the pioneering, classically trained pianist, composer, arranger and conductor who forever redefined a genre.

A successful musician is content with a career that lasts between 10 and 15 years. A truly successful musician is lucky if he has more than 20 or 30 years of activity.

Only unique talents can have a career spanning more than seven decades. The great Toshiko Akiyoshi is one of those rare talents, still touring at the age of 94.

Toshiko Akiyoshi, a Japanese-American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor, has been nominated for 14 Grammy Awards. She was the first Japanese musician to study at Berklee College of Music and was even the subject of a 1984 documentary, Jazz is my mother tongue.

She was a pioneer for Asian women in jazz, and her classical training and technique allowed her to stand out in a male-dominated musical tradition moving at the speed of sound.

So who is Toshiko Akiyoshi, what is her background and what is the scope of her impact on classical music and jazz?

What is Toshiko Akiyoshi’s background?

Akiyoshi was born in 1929 in Manchuria, China, to a Japanese family. She began playing the piano at the age of seven, taking classical music lessons twice a week.

In 1945, after World War II, Akiyoshi’s family lost their home and returned to Japan, settling in the city of Beppu. At the age of 16, already convinced of her love for classical music, she was introduced to jazz by a local record collector, who played her a recording of jazz pianist Teddy Wilson playing the standard “Sweet Lorraine.” She immediately fell in love with the sound and began studying jazz.

Absorbed by her new passion for jazz, she spent much of her teenage years transcribing jazz records, eager to learn everything she could about jazz piano. At 17, she began playing in a big band in Fukuoka.

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Her life changed forever when she was 22. At a concert in Tokyo, Oscar Peterson, a renowned jazz pianist and composer, happened to be in the audience. Immediately impressed by her mastery of the piano, he asked his producer to have Akiyoshi record his first album with Peterson’s trusted musicians.

Released in Japan and the United States, his first album, Toshiko’s Piano (1954), impressed Lawrence Berk, the founder of the Berklee school. The following year, Akiyoshi wrote a letter to Berk, asking him to give her a chance to study at Berklee. After a year of back-and-forth with the State Department and Japanese officials, Berk got Akiyoshi permission to enroll. He offered her a full scholarship and sent her a plane ticket to Boston. In January 1956, she became the first Japanese student at Berklee.

Akiyoshi encountered some difficulties because of her Japanese heritage after arriving in America. Some of her listeners saw her more as an oddity than a talented musician, a Japanese woman playing jazz in America. Akiyoshi told the Los Angeles Times:”At the time, a Japanese girl playing like Bud Powell was a very new thing. So all the press, all the attention, it wasn’t because I was authentic… It was because I was odd.“

Despite the mixed reception she initially received, she made a name for herself on the jazz scene and left her mark forever on a genre that has never been the same since.

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What does Toshiko Akiyoshi’s music sound like?

Akiyoshi’s classical roots and Japanese heritage shine through in her music and set her apart from other jazz musicians. She composed using Japanese themes, harmonies, and instruments, but her music remained firmly rooted in jazz, reflecting influences from Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Bud Powell.

“My music is essentially programmatic,” she explains. “Most big band writers were arrangers rather than composers, with the exception of Ellington, of course: they played popular tunes and had a singer and so on, but their music didn’t tell a story.

“For me, it’s very important to tell a story. My music has to have a certain attitude, it has to reflect my vision of certain things. That’s what I like to bring to the music I write: a point of view. That’s the difference between an author and an arranger.”

By integrating distinctively Japanese sounds and textures into American jazz forms, she used her grounding in classical technique and style to underpin her compositions, carving out a unique space in a burgeoning genre that reached its cultural peak in the 1950s and ’60s.

Watch her perform her brilliant composition “The Village” in the video below to get a sense of her signature sound, with the Japanese harmonies instantly shining through.

How many albums does she have?

One of the most impressive features of a first encounter with Akiyoshi’s work is her incredibly long discography. One of the most prolific artists of her generation, she released 75 albums during her long career.

His first album, Toshiko’s piano, was released in 1954, and his most recent album, The Eternal Duo! was released in 2019. She has a wide range of live albums and ensemble recordings, from solo piano collections to trios and quartets to big bands. Throughout her career, she has recorded continuously, averaging one studio album per year for over 50 years.

What awards has Toshiko Akiyoshi won?

Akiyoshi has won and been nominated for many of the music industry’s top awards and honors. In 2007, she received the Jazz Master Award from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. She won the Jazz Album of the Year Award Stereo Review for his second album, Long yellow road in 1976, and has garnered numerous awards and titles from jazz publications and music magazines over the years.

A 14-time Grammy nominee, Akiyoshi has been nominated 10 times for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance and four times for Best Instrumental Arrangement.

In 2004, she received the Order of the Rising Sun, an award recognizing individuals who have rendered outstanding service to Japan.

Who is Toshiko Akiyoshi’s family?

In 1959, Akiyoshi married saxophonist Charlie Mariano. After forming several bands together and having a daughter, Michiru, the couple divorced in 1967. That same year, she met saxophonist Lew Tabackin. Two years later, she married Tabackin and the couple moved to Los Angeles in 1972.

Akiyoshi’s daughter, known as Monday Michiru, is a singer-songwriter who, like her mother, blends a variety of styles and genres to create her own unique sound. Check out some footage below from a recent performance by the mother-daughter duo at the Blue Note Tokyo, a premier jazz club in Japan, when Akiyoshi was 92 years old!

As a performer, Toshiko Akiyoshi redefined what it meant to be a successful jazz pianist. Her mastery and command of the keys, along with the classical precision of her playing, raised the bar for performers around the world. Her brilliant balance of musical instinct and improvisation with technical refinement propelled jazz to new heights.

As a composer and arranger, she exponentially expanded the sonic world of a genre that was already defined by its diversity and fusion of influences, introducing Japanese harmonies and melodic motifs into a Western tradition for the first time. She pushed the boundaries of jazz even further than they already were, inspiring myriad others to imagine sounds and rhythms in contexts they had never considered.

As a conductor and an Asian woman in the United States, she blazed a new trail for women in a male-dominated genre. With her raw talent and sheer genius, she established a foothold not only for herself, but for generations of women who followed in her fearless footsteps.