Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and Lew Tabackin Perform the Music of Toshiko Akiyoshi
New York, NY (February 9, 2023) – The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and master tenor saxophonist Lew Tabackin will celebrate the magisterial legacy of composer and pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi who the National Women’s History Museum says, “changed the face of jazz music over her sixty-year career. As one of few women and Asian musicians in the jazz world, Toshiko Akiyoshi infused Japanese culture, sounds, and instruments into her music. As a pianist, bandleader, and composer-arranger, Akiyoshi cemented her place as one of the most important jazz musicians of the twentieth century.”
Co-music directed by Ted Nash, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and Lew Tabackin will play Toshiko Akiyoshi’s monumental compositions and will be joined by the iconic pianist-composer on stage for part of the performance.
The Music of Toshiko Akiyoshi will take place on March 10 & 11 at 8:00 pm in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY.
Manchuria-born, ethnically Japanese, Akiyoshi has been a force on the international scene since 1952, when the iconic pianist Oscar Peterson, on tour with Jazz at the Philharmonic, heard her in Tokyo and insisted that JATP impresario Norman Granz record her.
Akiyoshi — who moved to the U.S. in 1956, and will be 93 at the time of the concert — has impressed both for the comprehensive mastery and fierce distillation of the language of bebop master Bud Powell that she was able to assimilate early on in isolation from the U.S. scene and for her evocative corpus of sui generis works since 1973 for the Akiyoshi-Tabackin Orchestra with Lew Tabackin (who will play tenor saxophone and flute on this evening), combining swing, bebop, classical, and elements drawn from her Japanese heritage.
The Music of Toshiko Akiyoshi continues the orchestra’s season of cross-cultural offerings that illuminate, actualize, and reaffirm the notion of jazz as a global language and the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce distinct communities.
For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit Jazz.org. For live streaming information, visit JazzLive.com