I asked Hitomi what she wanted to express through her music. She said that art doesn’t express so much as a lot of expression leads to art. “Perhaps I am not thinking about art and purpose at all.” 

I take that to mean that rather than beginning with a concept, she allows the music to lead her. Informed by who she is and everything she has experienced, she intuitively follows the music and her feelings wherever they lead. It unfolds according to a certain internal logic that arises in the moment to express whatever needs to be expressed. When the result is experienced as honest, original, and deep, it’s art.

Now, it’s very nice when a musician does provide a clear concept articulated through words, but we shouldn’t require it or lament its absence. Music, after all, is non-verbal and is undoubtedly experienced and received, even understood, non-verbally. Sounds vibrate our cells and are felt throughout our bodies as well. The various qualities of music (tempo, pitch, volume, rhythm, harmonics, etc.) and the way they interact and the context in which they are heard are also all experienced by the listener and affect the listener regardless of how many of those qualities the listener can consciously recognize and describe in words. 

The magic of music is that it can transcend the composition and performance of all those qualities and move us, washing away distracting surface thoughts and connecting us with our own inspiration. Music can literally change our thought patterns and alter our brain waves and cellular vibrations, alleviating thought-induced tension in the body. We experience music somatically. Words, therefore, can, at best, provide only another way in, a secondary (and inferior) way to recognize, name, and share what we already know and can only fully grasp and experience non-verbally by listening to the music itself. Still, I think it can be fruitful to communicate verbally, to call attention to what we know and how we know and what we find so valuable in these experiences.

In 2015, Hitomi took what some considered an enormous professional risk. Following her curiosity and sense of joy, she elected to explore an altogether different genre of music and began a new project, “NHORHM.” Joined by Ryoji Orihara 織原良次 on fretless bass and Manabu Hashimoto 橋本学 on drums, the trio played Hitomi’s original jazz arrangements of heavy metal music, resulting in the album “New Heritage of Real Heavy Metal,” which engaged with classics of the genre. 

Interestingly, Hitomi’s love of metal began in high school, before she found jazz. Her best female friend was playing bass in a metal cover band and introduced her to the virtuosic speed metal guitar of Yngwie Malmsteen. Rather than dismissing it, Hitomi listened with genuine curiosity. 

Many years later in her first Hitomi Nishiyama’s Steel Jazz Woman column for the Tower Records music magazine Mikiki, Hitomi recounted, “I thought this was interesting, so I asked her to lend me an album called ‘The Seventh Sign.’ Can the guitar be played so fast with such a beautiful sound…? You’re doing something like classical music…? Although there are a lot of notes, it’s not a shouting or dirty sound, and it’s so meticulously made that you can’t play unless you’re pretty good at it technically…?” “For me, who has been listening to music mainly on the piano until then, the world of heavy metal guitar was incredibly interesting and ridiculous. It was a new world. It’s much more technical than I thought. It is more sophisticated than I imagined. And the range of music is much wider than I thought.”  

Roughly 20 years later, the band Babymetal had re-ignited interest in the genre, and a conversation with the head of Apollo Records led to the opportunity for Hitomi to pitch and eventually record the first NHORHM album. NHORHM stands for New Heritage of Real Heavy Metal, and the letters are also the initials of its three band members. Babymetal was another band that had affected Hitomi deeply. Babymetal was the first act Hitomi ever saw in the Tokyo Dome, and their song 悪夢の輪舞曲 (“Rondo of Nightmare” appears on that first NHORHM album alongside classics by Megadeath, Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, Pantera, and others. Below, you can listen to NHORM’s cover of Babymetal’s “The One” from their second album.

Some listeners reacted negatively, but many were delighted. Young Guitar Magazine and several famous metal musicians celebrated her achievement. The album sold well. She had opened an entirely new field of musical exploration with aplomb. 

Around the time her second NHORHM album came out, Hitomi was interviewed with Marty Friedman, lead guitarist of Megadeath, who loved her arrangements and skill. Megadeath was another of her big inspirations. In discussing how shocked people were by this metal-jazz crossover, Marty noted that as a teen, he taught himself to play Coltrane’s sax solos on guitar. As an adult, he sometimes studied jazz to understand certain musical phrases better. It’s been my experience that while record labels (and sometimes fans) want musicians to put out variations of the same kinds of records over and over, privately, most musicians enjoy all types of music, as do most non-musicians, for that matter.

To get more of a sense of Hitomi’s genius for transforming metal songs into something utterly new while still preserving, even magnifying the elegant beauty at their core, listen to her arrangement of Yngwie Malmsteen’s “Don’t Let It End” and then one of his own live performances of the song.

JazzofJapan.com describes this series of jazz metal albums well. “This is not just a mimicking of the original metal material. Rather, the music is heightened by the reformatting of the material through intricate arrangements, creative time signatures, harmonic changes, and skillful performances by the members honoring the music with fondness; they are having fun with the recital of music they genuinely appreciate,” and they unexpectedly bring out latent funky and melodic impulses in some of the songs.

Rather than taking offense at the various negative responses she received (along with much applause), Hitomi welcomed the diversity of reactions, engaged with the metal community, and delved deeper into her musical investigations of the genre. Several more best-selling albums followed, winning her a new audience and even greater media attention for this original and genre-defying music. 

Like many other musicians, Hitomi says she can no longer support herself as before through album sales and touring. Music streaming has nearly eliminated the income that so many musicians used to earn through album sales. Nevertheless, she is determined to continue. Despite her success and already long career, she still devotes herself to studying jazz history and further developing her compositional voice and approach to playing. She also now teaches younger musicians and writes about music for various online media outlets and heavy metal magazines. So, not only did exploring metal music open up new avenues for her music and win her new fans, including many overseas, but it also opened the door for her to express herself and earn money as a music writer. We can never envision all the gifts that can come into our lives when we permit ourselves to follow our curiosity.

Given that Japan ranks 118th among 146 countries in the gender gap rankings in 2024 and the environment for women was only worse in previous decades, I was curious to hear what it had been like for Hitomi, especially coming into the record label system in her mid-20s. She replied that when she was starting out, two older female musicians, pianists Ichiko Hashimoto and Junko Onishi, were a source of hope for her. Although she didn’t learn from them directly, “they are my role model. I know that without their efforts, I would not be here today.“

I feel it’s so important to highlight who inspired and mentored us. Our favorite artists and mentors did not create their works in a vacuum but were themselves influenced by the people and situations they encountered. Likewise, we should not expect or feel pressure to create something out of nothing. It’s healthy, perhaps even essential, to actively look for role models, inspiration, and encouragement.

I looked up Hitomi’s role model Junko Onishi. I learned that Junko had an exciting career in Boston and NY and was herself mentored by Jaki Byard, a pianist and influential educator at New England Conservatory of Music who had played with Mingus and was, like Hitomi, known for drawing on all kinds of musical influences outside canonical jazz. Jaki mentored many, including the young and future great jazz musicians Cannonball and Nat Adderley, while he served in the military in my hometown of Tallahassee, FL, during or just after WWII, something I did not know! Further illustrating the importance of mentors, when Jaki died in 1999, Junko felt so lost without her mentor that she quit playing for two years, resuming her recording career only years later, shortly after Hitomi’s first record came out.

Witnessing Ichiko’s and Junko’s successes and their determination to create the music that they loved rather than what was in fashion, she could see that female jazz musicians, and jazz pianists like herself in particular, could make a go of it in Japan. She must have drawn some confidence from that.

She would have needed it because, unfortunately, she experienced a lot of dangerous situations when she was younger. “When I started working as a pianist in the late 1990s, it was quite a male-dominated society. On the other hand, many opportunities for work were given in part because they would bring in customers and sell CDs. I had used this to my advantage to survive, and I think I may have helped to reinforce discrimination against women. I experienced some bad things and some good things. I have had many instances of sexual harassment from senior musicians, from people in publishing and record companies, from customers. A lot of it was not malicious….”

I don’t think anyone wants to have to talk about or even remember these things, but Hitomi wants to share her experiences in hopes that people in the future will not have to experience them. “I now reflect on the fact that I accepted it [unwanted attention or harassment] myself. I think it has decreased a lot now. I can imagine that there were many women who had to leave because of the bad things. In the future, I hope no other person…leaves from music…[due to] harassment.”

I asked her if working with other female musicians is in any way different or better. “Such situations are almost never the case. Even if the musicians are only women, the owner who booked them may be a man, or the audience is mostly men. On the other hand, there are plenty of all-male situations.” I found that to be as true in Japan as it seems to be everywhere.

What advice would you give to younger musicians? “I want you to do what you want and what you think is right. If you don’t like something or think it’s not right, you should say no.”

Thinking about how Hitomi’s consciousness of harassment and willingness to address it grew over the years along with her willingness to take musical risks reminds me of a conversation between the pianist Maya Keren and Maria Grand on Episode 2 of Maria’s podcast “like myscelium” about the importance of learning to recognize what feels good or not. Maria points out that a lot of young musicians might not yet know what feels good, and Maya responds that it’s not always so easy to know. “I went through a lot of times and moments in my life of kind of like pushing through things or kind of being like, Oh, I do want to do this, but not really wanting to….”

Maya says that what helped her to become more aware was to have some really great experiences and then realize that not all experiences feel as great.  Audre Lorde writes in The Uses of the Erotic, “Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”

Maya noticed that when she truly wants to do something, she feels that in her body like a loosening or a warmth or energizing, and when part of her does not really want to do something, she might feel some tightness or discomfort in her body. Paying attention to how she feels in her body, moment to moment, has helped her to recognize what she is feeling emotionally and what she really wants to do versus what she doesn’t really want to do or would only be doing to please someone else.

I think of this for two reasons. One is because Hitomi pointed out that some unwanted attention might seem unmalicious, illustrating how we can rationalize accepting unwanted behavior. It can sometimes feel difficult or scary to disappoint someone one is working with or to leave a work opportunity. It’s so important to pause and observe whether we truly want to say yes or no and give ourselves permission to express that.

The other reason I think this is so relevant is because jazz is itself a demonstration of freedom. It was created by African-American artists who were subjected to horrific, dehumanizing treatment under the American Jim Crow system. Despite all the disadvantages and dangers they faced, those early jazz artists chose to assert and celebrate their capacity for spontaneity and playfulness, their tolerance for uncertainty, and their unselfconscious creative energy, all of which is required to play jazz. In doing so at the highest level, these musicians demonstrated the absurdity of the white supremacist rhetoric insisting that people of color are lesser human beings incapable of deep thought or profound creation.

To respond improvisationally to everything one is feeling and experiencing, from the depths and fullness of one’s being, a jazz musician must be extraordinarily attuned to what she is feeling and to what is going on around her. And she must have digested everything she has learned about music to give voice to it instantly, without thinking or planning, because there’s no time to think in improvisation. She must be free inside to let go of trying to do what she thinks she is supposed to do and instead follow her deepest inspiration. So, self-awareness is as essential for playing jazz as it is for living a joyful life in accord with one’s spirit.

Claiming one’s freedom is inherently enlivening and empowering. Giving ourselves permission to experience the limitlessness of our spirit can generate an intense erotic charge. “There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (Lorde). Although the qualities of eroticism — limitless, chaotic, playful, intuitive, receptive, connecting — are typically considered feminine qualities, learning to recognize and connect with one’s deepest feelings, and ultimately with the joy beyond all feelings, is a facility available to everyone regardless of sex or gender. It is explicitly the project of jazz, undertaken through the practice of musical improvisation.

Female jazz musicians face obstacles that men do not. Because we live in a patriarchal society, women who claim and demonstrate their power/freedom/eroticism pay a price. One of the ways this happens (there are obviously others) is that women in their power/freedom/eroticism are viewed as acting “sexy” and desirous of amorous attention. The patriarchal conflation of all the qualities of the erotic with the sexual dismisses women’s subjectivity and agency and subjects them to unwanted attention. Think of how this dangerous dynamic might interfere with one’s ability to be fully present and creative and how it might deter some from trying at all.

So, it’s transformative when people gather to create together, guided by inspiration and in a communion of reciprocal respect, free of objectification and coercive behavior. Jazz offers us a practice through which we can experience the life force and creative wellspring we all share. And Jazz teaches us to experience the erotic as it is, in its fullness and variety, free of the impulse to reduce it to an invitation to or product of sexual pleasure-inducing touch.

Jazz is a way for us to know ourselves more fully and deeply. I am speaking of playing jazz, but this can also hold true for listening. As I said earlier, our brain waves attune to it. Our cells vibrate in concert with the music. We resonate. We become part of the music. And when we give ourselves over to deep listening, we join the play. We feel less self-conscious and more self-aware. We engage in deep connection with ourselves and others, alive and free. And if the musicians are not fully present and connected, we can hear and feel that, too, so jazz also teaches us to recognize the difference.

I’m going on about self-awareness and freedom and eroticism because my thoughts traveled there with Hitomi’s music, and the connections that arise in us while listening can teach us something about ourselves and one another. Hitomi has composed and arranged many flavors of music, but they do not “sound erotic” in the conventional sense. She’s not writing (so far) hip-shaking hot jazz or swing or funk and the like (as far as I know). She doesn’t seem to wear wild heavy metal costumes or set her piano on fire. But she’s clearly fueled by a powerful passion, its expression exquisite rather than raw. Her music is characterized by playful and surprising connections that are elegantly distilled and elaborated upon. Surely, her inspiration springs from some deep wellspring of joy and creativity within her, and that’s what the erotic is. It’s not a form, it’s the content, the source, and its expression could take any form. And the same could be said of jazz.

Let me return one more time to the words of Audre Lorde:  “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

Even though Hitomi didn’t explicitly make this connection in our conversation and might not even agree with it, for me, Hitomi’s music and her life in music make the connection for her. She demonstrates a commitment to exploring and expressing herself freely. In deepest conversation with her inspiration and undeterred by criticism, she creates music that connects us with our own. Having tasted freedom, she wants us to join her. Her songs sing to our souls. Those who listen are swept up in her currents, sounding the sounds of freedom with her.