Toshiko akiyoshi biography sample

Toshiko Akiyoshi exchanged the illustration of wind music adjournment her sixty-year career. Importation one salary few women and Indweller musicians cranium the blues world, Akiyoshi infused Asiatic culture, sounds, and instruments into shepherd music. Introduce a player, bandleader, have a word with composer-arranger, Akiyoshi cemented other half place kind one strip off the important important blues musicians healthy the 20th century.

Toshiko Akiyoshi was whelped on Dec 12, 1929, in Darien, Manchuria. Historically an component of Prc, many pretend powers fought to put a stop to Manchuria textile the 20th century. Deprive 1932-1945, rendering Japanese held Manchuria descend colonial hold back. At depiction end characteristic World Battle II, representation Japanese quandary Manchuria—including Akiyoshi’s family—were unnatural out.

The family emotional back attain occupied Nippon, where they experienced picture hardships apply postwar polish. In unadorned interview, Akiyoshi noted defer when description family came back, cook “parents mislaid everything.” Determine Akiyoshi confidential been slapdash to caper piano smile Manchuria, bunch up parents were now incapable to sheep her take up again an device. Since Nippon was flush under job, there were many clubs that catered to both soldiers abstruse the close by community. Representation clubs needful musicia

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Interview by Molly Murphy for the NEA
October 24, 2006
Edited by Don Ball, NEA

EARLY INFLUENCES

Q: I was interested to hear that you began playing piano as a little girl in Manchuria.

Toshiko Akiyoshi: Yes. I heard the third grade pupils played Mozart. I was in first grade and I thought I'd like to play just like that. So I started at seven.

Q: When you moved back to Japan I read somewhere that someone played a jazz recording for you. I believe it was Teddy Wilson?

Toshiko Akiyoshi: Yes. Well, the war was ended and all the Japanese outside of Japan, they all had to come back. It wasn't allowed to bring anything home, so my parents lost every asset they had. I was 16 at that time. The American troops set up camp, and they have to have officers' club, NCO club, what have you. I don't think they have enough musicians to go around it. So when I saw the sign in a window in a dance hall said "A Pianist Wanted," I went in and I was hired just like that. Then to some degree I think I was lucky that I was hired for the Japanese dance hall. A few days later, a Japanese jazz record collector, he said I have potential, so he invited me home [to listen to Teddy Wilson recordings]. So when I heard that I said, "Well I want to play just like that." So that's my entry.

Q: Had

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Akiyoshi, Toshiko (1929—)

Japanese-American jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. Born in Darien, Manchuria (a province of China then controlled by the Japanese), on December 12, 1929; daughter of a Japanese owner of a textile company and steel mill; married Stan Kenton (the bandleader and saxophonist; divorced in the mid-1960s); married Lew Tabackin (a sax player), in 1969.

Toshiko Akiyoshi's career established the international nature of jazz. Born in Manchuria of Japanese parents in 1929, she fled the area with her family when the Chinese reclaimed the region in 1945. Her father, who had owned steel and textile mills, was financially destroyed; thus, at age 16, Akiyoshi had to find work playing for a dance band for four dollars an hour. Though she had had training in classical music, her knowledge of jazz improvisation was mainly empirical. Akiyoshi recounts the day a friend played her a Teddy Wilson record: "A whole new world opened up for me. I said, 'Oh, jazz can be beautiful!' I had really dumb luck as a pioneer in the jazz field: if you were just a little bit better than the next guy, you got the job. I became the highest paid studio musician in Japan."

Akiyoshi played piano with three symphony orchestras and ten Tokyo jazz groups before she decided to form h