The Music of Toshiko Akiyoshi Tickets

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis play the monumental compositions of the iconic pianist-composer Toshiko Akiyoshi, as they are joined by her on stage for part of the performance.

Manchuria-born, ethnically Japanese, Akiyoshi has been a force on the international scene since 1952, when the iconic pianist Oscar Peterson, on tour with Jazz at the Philharmonic, heard her in Tokyo and insisted that JATP impresario Norman Granz record her.

Akiyoshi—who moved to the U.S. in 1956, and will be 93 at the time of the concert—has impressed both for the comprehensive mastery and fierce distillation of the language of bebop master Bud Powell that she was able to assimilate early on in isolation from the U.S. scene and for her evocative corpus of sui generis works since 1973 for the Akiyoshi-Tabackin Orchestra with Lew Tabackin (who will play tenor saxophone and flute on this evening), combining swing, bebop, classical, and elements drawn from her Japanese heritage.