The MIYUMI Project for Hyde Park Jazz Festival 2024

From the organizers: 

Tatsu Aoki’s The MIYUMI Project is a cross-cultural music journey and one of the first Asian-American/African-American collaborative music projects to come out of the Midwest in the late 90s. This project illuminates the drum traditions of Japanese taiko and jazz in a musical approach that incorporates the drummer languages of each genre. Infusing Japanese-influenced aesthetics of accompaniment within the rhythm section, the group carries this concept of time into, through, and underneath the music as an essential and natural thread.

Since the band’s formation and first release two decades ago, Aoki has forged an exceptional and inimitable Afro-Asian musical hybrid. Simply put, MIYUMI fuses the Japanese taiko drumming and performing arts tradition with the talents of first-class improvisers and experimentalists including Ed Wilkerson, Mwata Bowden, Jamie Kempkers, Kioto Aoki, and Tsukasa Taiko, most of whom herald from Chicago, where Aoki has been based since 1979.

The musicians:

Tatsu Aoki - bass, shamisen 

Mwata Bowden - woodwinds 

Edward Wilkerson Jr. - woodwinds 

Jamie Kempkers - cello 

Coco Elysses - congas, percussion

Tsukasa Taiko: Kioto Aoki, Noriko Suguyama,  Eigen Aoki, Miyumi Aoki

The dancers:  Yoshinojo Fujima

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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival is a FREE event. We ask that attendees able to do so, consider a $10 donation per person to keep it free for all.

For more information visit: https://www.hydeparkjazzfestival.org/tatsuaoki-miyumiproject