tatsu aoki’s miyumi project
Sunday, September 29
TIME: 3:00pm-4:00pm
VENUE: west stage. midway plaisance at south ellis ave.
Group photo of 6 members of the ensemble on a band stage. One musician holds a cello and one musician holds an upright bass. Two musicians are holding woodwind instruments. They are all smiling.
Photo by Rika Lin
tatsu Aoki’s miyumi project
Tatsu Aoki’s MIYUMI Project is a cross-cultural music journey and one of the first Asian-American/African-American collaborative music projects to come out of the Midwest in the late 90s. This project illuminates the drum traditions of Japanese taiko and jazz in a musical approach that incorporates the drummer languages of each genre. Infusing Japanese-influenced aesthetics of accompaniment within the rhythm section, the group carries this concept of time into, through, and underneath the music as an essential and natural thread.
Since the band’s formation and first release two decades ago, Aoki has forged an exceptional and inimitable Afro-Asian musical hybrid. Simply put, MIYUMI fuses the Japanese taiko drumming and performing arts tradition with the talents of first-class improvisers and experimentalists including Ed Wilkerson, Mwata Bowden, Jamie Kempkers, Kioto Aoki, and Tsukasa Taiko, most of whom herald from Chicago, where Aoki has been based since 1979.
The musicians:
Tatsu Aoki — bass, shamisen
Mwata Bowden — woodwinds
Edward Wilkerson Jr. — woodwinds
Jamie Kempkers — cello
Coco Elysses — congas, percussion
The dancers:
Tsukasa Taiko
Kioto Aoki
Noriko Sugiyama
Elgen Aoki
Yoshinojo Fujima
Miyumi Aoki