Word: toshiko
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Toshiko: Her Trio Her Quartet (Storyville). Japanese Jazz Pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi takes off on some fiery lyrical flights in this selection of eight compositions, two of them her own (Salute to Shorty, Pea, Bee and Lee). She is at her best in a couple of high, animated conversations with Alto Saxophonist Boots Mussulli (/'// Remember April, Kelo...
When she opened in Manhattan last week, a pressagent told Toshiko that she should wear a kimono all the time because she was, after all, the only female jazz pianist from Japan. As a concession, she wears a kimono on Saturday nights (the obi is apt to be too tight for really freewheeling playing, she complains), but the rest of the time she performs in Western cocktail dresses. Behind the piano at the Hickory House, across the way from West 52nd Street's sagging strip joints, Toshiko Akiyoshi demonstrates that she need not rely on costume for her success...
Back home in Japan, Pianist Toshiko, 27, used to listen to all of them on records -Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie. She would take down the melodies and try to decide why they improvised as they did. Her father was an industrialist in Manchuria, and she studied classical piano there until the family was forced to return to Japan by the Chinese civil war. Toshiko prepared for medical school, but when she got a job playing with a dance band at the U.S. Army officers' club, she decided she wanted to be a pianist instead...
Eventually, Toshiko would like to go back to Japan: "The position of the jazz musician there is so low now that I feel a responsibility to do something about it. I'd like to go back and start an orchestra for the movies, and once a month or so we could present a jazz concert." But she knows also that Japan is not a challenging place for developing jazz talent; the competition is too thin. "When you push against a wall," says Toshiko, "you know you are pushing. When you push a curtain, it gives...
...blonde and bustling, Pia is one in a series of foreign jazz pianists-including a blind Scotsman (Joe Saye). an Argentine (Enrique Villegas). a German (Jutta Hipp) and a Japanese (Toshiko AkiyoshH -currently performing in the U.S. These pianists represent a reimported export, and Netherlander Beck is a fine sample of how exportable and reimportable jazz is. If Bach fugues can be learned outside Germany, there seems to be no reason why New Orleans riffs cannot be learned out side the U.S. "I dig jive," says the girl from Holland, "but the most important thing is not to goof when...