Hiromi Plays In Colors, At Highline Ballroom This Week (3/30 & 3/31)
Whew – Hiromi can play! As she explained when I had a chance to speak with her this week, she was born in Hamamatsu so she she shares a hometown with the manufacturer of the pianos she plays – Yamaha. She came to the states in 99 to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston but has been based in Brooklyn for about a decade.
She started to compose almost simultaneously with beginning to practice at age 6. After a couple of years of classical instruction, the teacher that Hiromi refers to in the video, Noriko Hikida, introduced her to Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson. Hiromi – whose last name is Uehara – started to improvise and she was on her mononymous way! At age 17, she was taking a lesson in a building where Chick Corea turned up. Corea was in Japan playing some shows and, after chatting and improvising together, he invited her on stage with him the following evening. The experience needless to say was profound and a huge punctuation mark was put on it a decade later when the two recorded the album Duet in tandem at Tokyo Blue Note.
Hiromi was performed and recorded solo and with groups. Her new album Spark is the fourth with The Trio Project featuring Anthony Jackson and Simon Phillips. The trio launched 6 years ago but Jackson and Phillips go back at least to the early 90s as AJ played on Si-Phi‘s Force Majeure album in 92. Phillips is as an accomplished and in-demand stickman as, well, anyone. His resume is ridiculous. Without belaboring the point; Mick Jagger, The Who, Jeff Beck, Jack Bruce, Peter Gabriel, Joe Satriani, Al DiMeola, Stanley Clarke, The Pretenders, and Dave Gilmour just represent a healthy sampling of the artists he’s worked with. Jackson’s skills and credits are no less formidable with past collaborators including Mike Stern, Buddy Rich, Madonna, Steely Dan, Al Di Meola, Chick Corea, John Scofield, and Simon & Garfunkel…again just to name a few!
Clearly then an extremely dangerous trio. Catch ’em tonight or tomorrow night at The Highline if you can…