Photo © by Christopher PelhamThrough music, dance, and conscious exploration, Sita Chay’s “When My Exile Sees Me,” presented May 20, 2023 at Joe’s Pub, creates a loving and accepting space to invite healing and acceptance of all our inner exiled parts.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamFrom Sept 21 – 23, Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³) held its 2nd annual M³ Festival at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY. The event brought together musicians from around the world from M³'s 3rd and 4th cohorts, many of them meeting and performing together in person for the first time. One of two public events that M³ held this year, the festival provides a platform both for its cohort participants and for the organization itself and its mission.
The 2023 M³ Festival boasted an exceptional roster of 21 M³ cohort artists plus numerous ensemble members, each contributing their unique talents and artistic vision. In the relentless pursuit of balance and diversity, this lineup of composer-performers was thoughtfully curated to embody innovation across genres.
“This year’s festival musicians from M³’s third and fourth cohorts are hands down some of the most groundbreaking composer-performers in the world today, each with a stunning clarity of vision that you’ll rarely if ever find gathered together in one place,” said Shyu. Indeed, the Festival’s many musical collaborations were dizzying in variety and dazzling in quality.
Photo © by Alex JosephMaya 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.
Photo © by Eunbi Kim – collage of stills from the official music video for Eunbi Kim's "Saturn Years"This spring I had the pleasure of attending two uplifting events led by genre-fluid pianist Eunbi Kim at the National Arts Club, where she is one of 14 2023/2024 National Arts Club Artist Fellows. Rather than presenting formal concerts, Eunbi (she/her) created a series of gatherings. This approach suited the Club’s intimate spaces and allowed her to work interactively with the audience, sharing how music and mindfulness practice can work together to connect and heal us.
The two gatherings I attended, “How to Love” on March 6 and “Deep Listening” on May 19, each incorporated live music, talking, and visual elements. Eunbi cast the audience as improvisational partners, enabling them to explore the nexus of music and meditation along with her.
A visit to MUSE (Music Unites Special Education), a certified NPO founded in Sendai City by pianist Atsuko Nishina in 2001 to increase the opportunities for people with special needs to touch highly artistic music and art and express themselves freely through artistic creative activities, with composer Aya Nishina 仁科彩 and her partner, the visual artist Shimpei Takeda 武田慎平, afforded me the opportunity to understand their creative work more deeply and to recognize that their art and their teaching work, while different in form, have the same purpose, each informed by and expressing the same universal spiritual principles that, in fact, guide all true healing work.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn my first night in Kyoto, I attended FOUR DANCERS vol281 at UrBANGUILD, a cafe/bar and multidisciplinary performance space in the heart of Kyoto. Like an old-school club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it’s dark, grungy, and covered in flyers. UrBANGUILD presents a wide variety of younger and older artists and draws an extremely diverse audience as well, making it a beloved oasis for contemporary and experimental performing artists in the otherwise more traditional and conservative-minded Kyoto. I came to see two artists in particular, Chizuko Kotani / 小谷ちず子 and Miwako Inagaki / 稲垣美輪子.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn my second night in Kyoto, I went to Candy Live Jazz in Gion to see the trio of Kotono Nishimura 西村琴乃 (alto and soprano sax), Yuka Yanagihara 柳原由佳 (piano), and Ayuko Ikeda 池田安友子(percussion). I was not familiar with any of them, but from the start, I found their set, inspired by the spring season, infectious, rhythmically adventurous, and uplifting.
At times, most notably during Kotono’s number “Milky Way” from her album “Favorable Move,” I felt as if I’d been transported to a landscape untarnished by humans, where dawn is breaking over mountains in a river-fed valley of verdant splendor where you can hear birds singing and take a breath, like in a Thomas Cole painting, a place where you can look up on a clear, moonless night and be awestruck by the majesty of the Milky Way, so far away and yet seemingly so close.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamMy encounter with the well-known — but new to me — pianist Hitomi Nishiyama 西山瞳 at SUB Jazz Cafe, a seminal jazz club in Osaka, took me to places I never expected. Although she was playing jazz standards with a makeshift band, her music and career, characterized by curious changes in direction and exquisite elaborations on connections previously unrecognized, set us free.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn a sunny 5th of May — Children’s Day in Japan — I made my way to what seemed like an unlikely venue, Mifa Football Cafe, for a matinee child/family-friendly concert and luncheon called “Song of the Earth,” organized by the J-Pop singer Asuca Hayashi 林明日香. Mifa is located in Toyosu, one of a series of artificial islands in Tokyo Bay just southeast of the former Tsukuji Fish Market in Tokyo, a strange but fitting location. Both Asuca and the people of Tokyo were charting a new course in pursuit of more healthy, sustainable lives.
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn my last night in Osaka, I attended the closing night reception for the solo exhibition 置き去られた鏡 The Forsaken Mirror by celebrated artist Chie Matsui 松井智惠. The performance consisted of music by avant-garde musicians sara (piano, perc.) & Shin’ichi Isohata 磯端伸 (guitar) and a poem read in Japanese, Korean, and English by Chie, Yangjah, and Miho, respectively. At first, I didn’t know what to make of the performance or the abstract, brightly colored prints surrounding a centrally hung mirror. Eventually, in the space created by the disorientation and abstraction, I reflected on who these people were, who I was, and the various identities we experience throughout life, which proved enlivening.
