Piano and Composition | b. 1929

Toshiko Akiyoshi built one of the most distinctive sounds in big band jazz by refusing to leave her own background out of it. Born in Liaoyang, Manchuria in 1929 to a Japanese family, she lost everything when the family was repatriated to Japan after the war, and was working as a dance hall pianist by 16 when a Teddy Wilson record introduced her to jazz. Oscar Peterson discovered her playing in Tokyo in 1953 and arranged for Norman Granz to record her, a connection that eventually brought her to Berklee as its first Japanese student in 1956. After years gigging in New York, she married saxophonist and flutist Lew Tabackin in 1969, and the couple's 1973 Los Angeles rehearsal band grew into the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra featuring Lew Tabackin. Inspired by Duke Ellington's use of African musical heritage, she began incorporating Japanese folk melody, Noh theatre vocal styles and traditional instrumentation into her orchestral writing, a direction that defined "Kogun" (RCA, 1974) and the decades of big band composition that followed. She received fourteen Grammy nominations, became the first woman to win DownBeat's Best Arranger and Composer awards, and was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2007.