Keep
Talkin', the new trio album by Japanese-born, Boston-based Yoko Miwa, documents
a pianist and composer operating at the peak of her powers. While maintaining
her undeniable signature, Miwa's musicianship evokes the harmonic finesse and
rhythmic brilliance of key influences like Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, McCoy
Tyner and Oscar Peterson. Her expansive, versatile writing presents both a
remarkable ear for melody and an earthy, intuitive feel for groove. And as an
arranger and interpreter, Miwa showcases her fantastic knack for programming:
From jazz standards to Brazilian music to unsung gems by pop and folk heroes,
each of her selections is definitively remade in her image while retaining its
core charms.
In the end,
those delights coalesce around Miwa the bandleader, who helms gifted players
including her husband, the drummer Scott Goulding, and the bassists Will Slater
and Brad Barrett with intelligence and dexterity. Or as the Boston Globe said
of the Miwa Trio's previous album, 2017's Pathways-which hit No. 6 on the
JazzWeek chart-her music is "bright and accessible. Š Miwa's technical
chops are evident, yet she's anything but showy; she prizes space in her sound,
and leaves room for the deep interplay her group has honed over the
years."
But
excellent jazz piano trios are made rather than born, and Keep Talkin' tells
that story as well. A professor at the prestigious Berklee College of Music,
Miwa is a rare educator who seems to log just as much bandstand time as she
does classroom hours. Over the last two decades, Miwa and her cohorts have
worked constantly, mostly in one of America's great jazz towns. In the elastic,
buoyant communication within Keep Talkin', you can hear the hard-earned lessons
of all those gigs together-the unplanned set lists and loose, fun hangs of
Boston-area spots like the Mad Monkfish, Les Zygomates and the recently, sadly
shuttered Ryles Jazz Club, as well as dates for deep-listening audiences at
premier rooms like Scullers, Regattabar, the Blue Note in New York and Blues
Alley in D.C. To put it more directly, the material, arrangements and musical
conversations on Keep Talkin' have undergone the intensive testing and
refinement that can only come with playing for audiences.
"I love
that we have the steady gigs," Miwa says. "We understand each other,
we get familiar with the songs, and we can see the audience's reaction when we
play a new song." Ensuring that listeners are both intellectually
challenged and joyfully engaged is a forgotten art in jazz these days, but the
Yoko Miwa Trio and Keep Talkin' strike an inspired balance between head and
heart.
Keep Talkin'
gets an auspicious, hard-grooving start with its title track, a Miwa original
and live-set staple that evokes the boogaloo jazz of your favorite '60s Blue
Note LPs. Miwa and company then pay homage to Thelonious Monk, with an "In
Walked Bud" that highlights Miwa's philosophy of reverent reinvention; in
robust, woody tones, bassist Slater carries much of the melody. A Miwa original
follows, "Secret Rendezvous," an exercise in the kind of tuneful
mainstream jazz-piano mastery that garners repeat spins on jazz radio. Next is
one of Miwa's early compositions, her swinging, romantic "Sunset
Lane," which underscores her profound appreciation for Bill Evans.
Miwa's take
on Charles Mingus' "Boogie Stop Shuffle," where the smoking, roiling
frontline horns of the Mingus Ah Um recording are distilled into Miwa's two
hands, offers a clinic in creative piano-trio arrangement. To honor her
long-running love for the Lennon-McCartney songbook, Miwa arranges two gorgeous
yet still underrated songs off the Beatles' Abbey Road-"Golden
Slumbers" and "You Never Give Me Your Money." Her search for new
music to interpret never ends, Miwa says, though many songs simply aren't
effective in a jazz piano-trio context. These two heartrending melodies, however,
took beautifully to jazz arranging and became live favorites, leading to many
requests for a recording. Miwa and Slater share athletic unison lines on the
inquisitive "Tone Portrait." A passionate devotee of Brazilian music,
especially the late vocal legend Elis Regina, Miwa heard the Los Hermanos song
"Casa Pre-Fabricada" in a version by Regina's daughter, the singer
Maria Rita, and became enamored of its whimsy and graceful contours.
On
"Conversation," Miwa turns a Joni Mitchell deep cut into a tour de
force for gospel-tinged chording and ebullient, pastoral improvisation. (No
surprise: It's the most Jarrett-esque performance on the album.) Rounding out
the disc are two more Miwa compositions. "If You're Blue," a Monk-ish
theme, features Miwa's original melody atop the changes to Irving Berlin's
"Puttin' on the Ritz." "Sunshine Follows the Rain,"
recorded during the sessions that became Pathways, began as a shorter piece she
crafted for an independent film score. Bittersweet and rhapsodic, Miwa's performance
is impeccably complemented by Goulding's sensitive brushwork and the
beautifully lyrical arco bass playing of Brad Barrett, in his lone performance
on the album.
Born in
Kobe, Japan, Miwa was trained classically and didn't become immersed in jazz
until she began studying with Minoru Ozone, the late keyboardist, educator and
club owner, and the father of pianist Makoto Ozone. Miwa describes the elder
Ozone as an "old-school" teacher who instilled in her the importance
of playing by ear and absorbing jazz's language by listening and transcribing.
She was employed as an accompanist and piano instructor at his music school,
and a waitress at his popular jazz club-where she cut her teeth performing,
sometimes off the cuff at Ozone's request. Tragedy struck Kobe in 1995 with the
Great Hanshin earthquake, which leveled both Ozone's school and club.
"That was the scariest thing to happen in my life," Miwa says. "But
I realized that we were very lucky to be alive. A lot of people lost their
lives, lost their houses and families." She enrolled at the Koyo
Conservatory of Music, a Berklee affiliate school, and, on a whim, auditioned
for a full scholarship prize at the flagship school in Boston. To her
astonishment, Miwa won first prize-but even then, she needed convincing from
her peers to make the trek.
Once in
Boston in 1997, she fell in love with the city and dug into her jazz education.
"I was the last one to leave a practice room every night at 2 a.m.,"
she recalls. "I was just so excited to meet great musicians-my teachers
and fellow students-from all over the world. I felt like my world just
changed." Throughout her years at Berklee, as a student and, later, as an
accompanist and a Professor in the Piano Department, she has achieved many
personal and creative breakthroughs. She met her husband, Goulding, in a class;
in fact, their meet-cute involves a duo performance. As a staff accompanist
with plenty of previous experience backing singers, she worked in master
classes with the late vocal great Kevin Mahogany, who asked her to gig with him
later on. "He was always very nice to me," Miwa recalls. "He
wrote me before he passed away: You are always one of my favorite pianists."
A Yamaha
Piano Artist, Miwa has performed and/or recorded with other luminaries as well,
among them Esperanza Spalding, Terri Lyne Carrington, Arturo Sandoval, Sheila
Jordan, Slide Hampton, George Garzone, Jon Faddis, Jerry Bergonzi, Johnathan
Blake and John Lockwood. As a leader she has recorded seven previous albums,
including her acclaimed Japanese debut for JVC Victor Entertainment, 2012's Act
Naturally, which was promoted with a concert tour of Japan. Other career
highlights include a spot in the Jazz at Lincoln Center program "Marian
McPartland & Friends," part of the Coca-Cola Generations in Jazz
Festival, and a performance in Lincoln Center's annual Jazz and Leadership
Workshop for the National Urban League's Youth Summit. She has also acted as a panelist
for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Consider
Keep Talkin' the culmination of Miwa's thriving jazz-life-in-progress-her
still-evolving work as a player and composer, her relentless search for new
songs and her tireless live-performance ethic, which has allowed her and her
band to entertain generations of jazz fans. "I hope people will see who I
am as a musician and a pianist on this album," she says.
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