A to Z

Music

Asuca Hayashi at MIFA Football Cafe, May 5, 2024

Photo © by Christopher Pelham

Asuca Hayashi 林明日香 — Song of the Earth, Tokyo (May 5, 2024)

On 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.

Sofiane Ouissi and dove from "Bird," photo © by Pol Guillard

Photo © by Pol Guillard, L’Art Rue-Dream City 2025

Music Dance Art

Dancing with a Dove

At the Aichi Triennale 2025, one experience stood out as a shared highlight for our group of thirteen: Bird by the brother-and-sister team Selma and Sofiane Ouissi. Doves make no effort to “collaborate” or to “create a good work.” For this reason, Sofiane must have needed a radically different reconstruction of bodily context than in dancing solo or with another human. That was what I wanted to witness.

Yukari Sekiya (p) at Studio T-Bone, Osaka

Photo © by Christopher Pelham

Japan Travel Music

Finding Freedom in Music & Motherhood — Yukari Sekiya 関谷友加里 at Studio T-Bone, Osaka (4/19/24)

While struggling to find contemporary jazz venues in Osaka, I stumbled upon Studio T-Bone, a venue supporting both live jazz and photography and decided to visit. Pianist Yukari Sekiya 関谷友加里 and percussionist Naoto Yamagishi 山㟁直人やまぎしなおと were improvising together. While I didn't manage to get to know them well on that occasion, I was delighted to spend time with the creative family members running the studio. A chance encounter months later unexpectedly brought Yukari back into my mind. When I reached out to her, she responded, and I've now learned what a deep and inspiring artist and person she is, opening the door to possible future collaborations. It was a powerful reminder that we can't always see right away why our intuition speaks to us. Sometimes, it may be setting something in motion far in the future or for a purpose quite different from what we imagine.

Music

Freedom to Flow with Todd Marston

No one ever actually told me how to live as a musician. There are many ways, and you have so much freedom to create your own way. And that’s not easy because the choices are endless. So, I started this series of interviews to ask my friends how they live as artists. This first interview was with Todd Marston, my long-time friend and a keyboard player, composer, and educator.

Music

Let Me Have It All: Reconsidering Sly & the Family Stone’s Fresh

Sylvester "Sly Stone" Stewart died on June 9th, 2025. There have been a lot of narratives about his life and death, but less about his music, particularly his under-appreciated 1973 album, Fresh. True to its title, Fresh is lighter, more relaxed, and much more personal than any music Sly had written to date. It's also much funkier, as Sly had in turn embraced the deep grooves of the Bootsy Collins-era JBs of James Brown.

Photo © by CydScottPhoto

Music

Making a Life, Not a Career: Listening for the Life That Wants to Grow with Paul Hansen

Paul Hansen is the person who inspired me to explore this theme I call Art of Life. When we last talked on Zoom, he said something that stayed with me: artists have to find their own way to live because no two lives unfold the same way. In this interview, Paul repeated that the essence of life is a long chain of decisions made based on one's own aesthetic sense, and that is what it means to be an artist.

Yuka Yanagihara 柳原由佳 (p), Kotono Nishimura 西村琴乃 (sax), Ayuko Ikeda 池田安友子(percussion) at Candy Jazz Gion in Kyoto 4/17/24

Photo © by Christopher Pelham

Music Travel Japan

Back to the Garden at Candy Live Jazz in Kyoto (April 17, 2024)

On 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.

Dancer Chizuko Kotani and 5-string fretless bass player Hajime Totani at UrBANGUILD FOuR DANCERS vol.281, 4/16/24

Photo © by Christopher Pelham

Dance Japan Travel Music

Facing Death, Finding Oneself at UrBANGUILD, Kyoto (April 16, 2024)

On 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.

Music

Five Ways To Think About Parliament’s Mothership Connection

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the seminal funk album Parliament's Mothership Connection.

detail from MUSE Kotori Forest Project book

Travel Japan Art Music

In Sendai, A MUSE for Everyone (April 13, 2024)

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.

Ruth Naomi Floyd and Vino Wu Group at Roulette, 9/23/23

Music

M³ Festival Demonstrates the Power of Inclusivity

From 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.

Music

Pianist Eunbi Kim: How to Love Through Deep Listening

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.