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wherever I wanted. I’m sure I’m playing music
today because of her.”
Hiromi’s admiration for Hakita continues
today. “Noriko told me from day one that music
doesn’t come from the fingers to the ears,”
Hiromi says. “It comes from heart to heart. If
you don’t deliver the music from heart to heart,
there’s really no meaning for it to exist.”
Hiromi’s introduction to improvisation at
such an early age bore fruit when she was 17.
She was visiting Tokyo to take a lesson at a
music school, where by coincidence Chick
Corea was practicing on a piano for his upcoming
show in the city. “I decided to say hello to
him, to meet him,” she says. “He asked me to
play something for him. Then he asked if I could
improvise. I told him yes, so I sat down at the
other piano in the room, and we played free
improvisation for a while.”
Corea asked Hiromi if she was free the
next night and asked her if she’d be interested
in playing a song together at the end of his
show. Hiromi stayed an extra night in Tokyo
and, as Corea had promised, performed with
him on stage.
In 2006, Hiromi creatively rendezvoused
with Corea again at the Tokyo Jazz Festival as a
duo in an hourlong set, which impelled him to
ask her to record an entire album of piano duets.
That resulted in the Duet CD, which became the
No. 1-selling record in Japan in 2007. They performed
together for three nights at the Blue Note
in Tokyo and later in front of nearly 6,000 people
at the famed Budokan arena.
While Hiromi enjoyed success in Japan
beginning as teenager performing
with orchestras (including a gig when
she was 14 performing with the Czech
Philharmonic at its home base) and later writing
advertising jingles, she decided to further her education
by enrolling at Berklee in 1999 as a jazz
composition major—not a performance major,
she hastens to point out. “I was basically studying
the instruments I didn’t play,” she says. “I studied
orchestra and big band charts, which is what I
always wanted to do. As for playing the piano, I
did that at night jamming with the guys. Daytime
I was at school studying the great arrangers and
composers; at night, I was having fun and learning
in a whole different way, meeting all these
amazing musicians. It was a treasure chest.”
As she was coming down the home stretch
for earning her degree at Berklee, Hiromi took a
string arrangement class with Richard Evans.
He was so impressed by an arrangement she
wrote for a standard that he asked her to work
on an arrangement of one of her own compositions.
He asked her to bring some tunes to work
on. “Richard saw the potential I had as a
writer,” Hiromi says, “but he had no idea that I
could play the piano. So I brought a demo CD
in, and he asked me who was playing the piano.
I told him, it’s me.”
Once again, Evans was so taken that he
offered to have a good friend of his listen to her
piano playing. The friend turned out to be
Ahmad Jamal, who initially said that he wasn’t
much interested in listening to a student. But
Evans insisted and played the recording over the
phone to him. Jamal’s curiosity was piqued, he
requested the CD demo of the song “The Tom
And Jerry Show,” met Hiromi over dinner and
then almost immediately hooked her up with
Telarc to make her debut recording, Another
Mind, which he and Evans produced.
“After that all these things came together,”
says Hiromi, who still talks with Jamal on a regular
basis. “Ahmad opened all these doors to me. I
knew his music, and here I was having dinner
with him and talking about putting a record out.
It’s like a scene from a movie, but I never thought
something like that would happen to me.”
Since Another Mind, Hiromi recorded four
CDs (not including A Place To Be) and two
DVDs that capture her dynamic performances,
with plenty of smiling action. Her band
Sonicbloom features guitarist and Berklee
teacher Dave Fiuczynski, who serves as the perfect
complement to the bandleader. “I was
always a fan of Dave’s Screaming Headless
Torsos, so for my first album I asked him to
play,” says Hiromi. “He’s edgy and experimen-
34 DOWNBEAT March 2010