Toshiko Akiyoshi is a Japanese-American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader. A local record collector introduced her to jazz by playing a record of Teddy Wilson playing “Sweet Lorraine.” She immediately loved the sound and began to study jazz. In 1952, during a tour of Japan, pianist Oscar Peterson discovered her playing in a club on the Ginza. Peterson was impressed and convinced record producer Norman Granz to record her. In 1953, under Granz’s direction, she recorded her first album with Peterson’s rhythm section: Herb Ellis on guitar, Ray Brown on double bass, and J. C. Heard on drums. The album was released with the title Toshiko’s Piano in the U.S. and Amazing Toshiko Akiyoshi in Japan.
Akiyoshi studied jazz at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. In 1955, she wrote a letter to Lawrence Berk, asking him to give her a chance to study at his school. After a year of wrangling with the State Department and Japanese officials, Berk was given permission for Akiyoshi to enroll. He offered her a full scholarship, and he mailed her a plane ticket to Boston. In January 1956, she became the first Japanese student at Berklee. Soon after, she appeared as a contestant on the March 1956 broadcast of the CBS television panel show What’s My Line? In 1998, she was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee, by then known as the Berklee College of Music.
Akiyoshi did experience some difficulties as a result of her Japanese heritage after coming to America. Some of her audience saw her as an oddity more than a talented musician, a Japanese girl playing jazz in America. According to Akiyoshi, some of her success was attributed to her being an oddity, saying in an interview with the LA Times, “In those days, a Japanese woman playing like Bud Powell was something very new. So all the press, the attention, wasn’t because I was authentic…It was because I was strange”.
Akiyoshi married saxophonist Charlie Mariano in 1959. The couple had a daughter, Michiru. She and Mariano divorced in 1967 after forming several bands together. During the same year, she met saxophonist Lew Tabackin, whom she married in 1969. Akiyoshi, Tabackin, and Michiru moved to Los Angeles in 1972. In March 1973, Akiyoshi and Tabackin formed a 16-piece big band composed of studio musicians. Akiyoshi composed and arranged music for the band, and Tabackin served as the band’s featured soloist on tenor saxophone and flute. The band recorded its first album, Kogun, in 1974. The title, which translates to “one-man army”, was inspired by the tale of a Japanese soldier lost for 30 years in the jungle who believed that World War II was still being fought and thus remained loyal to the Emperor. Kogun was commercially successful in Japan, and the band began to receive critical acclaim.
The couple moved to New York City in 1982 and assembled the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra featuring Lew Tabackin. Akiyoshi toured with smaller bands to raise money for her big band. Years later, BMG continued to release her big band’s recordings in Japan but remained skeptical about releasing the music in the United States. Although Akiyoshi was able to release several albums in the U.S. featuring her piano in solo and small combo settings, many of her later big band albums were released only in Japan.
In December 2003, her band played its final concert at Birdland in New York City, where it had enjoyed a regular Monday night gig for more than seven years. Akiyoshi explained that she disbanded the ensemble because she was frustrated by her inability to obtain American recording contracts for the big band. She also said that she wanted to concentrate on her piano playing from which she had been distracted by years of composing and arranging. She has said that although she has rarely recorded as a solo pianist, that is her preferred format. In March 2004, Warner Japan released the final recording of Akiyoshi’s big band. Titled Last Live in Blue Note Tokyo, the album was recorded in November 2003.
Akiyoshi received fourteen Grammy Award nominations and was the first woman to win Best Arranger and Composer awards in Down Beat magazine’s annual Readers’ Poll. In 1984, she was the subject of the documentary Jazz is My Native Language. In 1996, she published her autobiography, Life with Jazz, and in 2007 she was named an NEA Jazz Master by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.
