Collection: Toshiko Akiyoshi

Toshiko Akiyoshi was 16 and playing dance halls in occupied Japan for four dollars an hour when a friend played her a Teddy Wilson record and changed the direction of her life. She was already a working pianist around Tokyo when Oscar Peterson heard her in 1953 and convinced Norman Granz to record her, a session that became her first album and, indirectly, her ticket to America: in 1956 she became the first Japanese student admitted to Berklee. Years of New York club work followed before she met saxophonist and flutist Lew Tabackin, married him in 1969, and moved to Los Angeles in 1972, where the two formed what was meant to be a casual rehearsal band the following year. It became the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra featuring Lew Tabackin, and from the start it sounded like nothing else in big band jazz. After reading Nat Hentoff's writing on Duke Ellington's relationship to his own African heritage, Akiyoshi began deliberately weaving Japanese folk melody, Noh theatre vocal technique, and traditional instrumentation into orchestral jazz writing, a direction that produced "Kogun" (RCA, 1974), her breakthrough record and a Swing Journal Silver Disk winner. Fourteen Grammy nominations followed across a decades-long career that never stopped pushing in that direction. What's stocked here centres on the RCA-era big band recordings.