Year 2024

Imaishi police station & ferris wheelPhoto © by Christopher Pelham

Imaishi — April 10, 2024

After one night in Tokyo and a quick lunch (inexpensive but outstanding chirashi-sushi with a photographer friend in Tsukuji), I took the Tohoku Shinkansen train from Ueno Station to Utsunomiya and transferred to the JR Nikko line but got off one stop early at Imaishi. Imaishi is the little town just to the east of the popular and historic temple town of Nikko, which was where I was heading, but Imaishi has its own famous cedar road and sakura road, and I thought I would check it out on the way.

Careful in the Sun promo photo by Alex JosephPhoto © by Alex Joseph

When the Sun Comes

Maya Keren's five-piece band Careful in the Sun is about to embark on its first mini tour, with support from CRS, and I reached out to Maya to learn more about their music and vision, which fuses elements of jazz and pop and draws inspiration from black queer liberation literature.

I first saw them in June 2022 at the M³ Festival, produced by Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. While still an undergrad at Princeton University, Maya (they/them) had participated in M³'s first cohort of duo commission grantees back in the summer of 2020. In this concert, Maya led the band from the piano, and I was struck by their dreamy sound, camaraderie, and joie de vivre onstage. I found myself exhaling, expanding, drawn in and drawn inward. I softened.