Hiromi at FIJM 23'

Additional Information

This year’s Festival International de Jazz de Montréal sees pianist extraordinaire Hiromi Uehara returning to the festival after six years. We spoke to Hiromi from New York City about her upcoming show with PUBLIquartet.

PAN M 360: Hi Hiromi, thanks for taking time. I noticed this year you will be playing with a string quartet, could you tell us a little more about the show?

Hiromi: Yeah sure. This is a project that I made an album with in 2020, but it was released in 2021. Of course when everything stopped during the pandemic, when I had to be at home for many, many weeks like everyone else, I started to think about what I could do under the circumstances. At the time I was living in Tokyo and of course no one was flying in to play anymore. There is a club called Blue Note Tokyo, and every show they had booked was all of a sudden cancelled, and since I’m close to them, I told them that I could help out and fill those dates. I think I must have ended up performing 111 shows or something like that and I called the series ‘Save Live Music’. During that time I began to think of something new that I could do, and I thought about working with a string quartet.

I had played a couple of times with the Tokyo Philharmonic and I knew some amazing classical players from there. And, you know, I always had this passion to write for strings, I love the sound of strings, and so I started to write about this emotional journey through the pandemic. We performed one show and it turned out really well and I wanted to record it, so I did, and it was released in 2021. It’s called Silver Lining Suite.

When things began to open up again, I started a tour in Europe with a European quintet, and here in the States, there is an American quintet called PUBLIquartet. So I had three different international string quartets to work with over this period and this year the PUBLIquartet is the one that I’ll be playing with. They are based in New York, such an amazing, inspiring quartet.

PAN M 360: Sounds like it’s going to be a special show then!

Hiromi: Yes and it’s always amazing to play Montreal.

PAN M 360: When was the last time you were here? Was it for Spark with Anthony Jackson and Simon Phillips?

Hiromi: Actually it was 2017 with Edmar Castañeda , the harpist. In fact we made a live album out of that performance. It’s called Live in Montreal.

PAN M 360: This year will be a really interesting festival because it seems to be a really interesting time for ‘jazz’ music. We seem to be losing masters but at the same time a whole new generation is ready to fill their shoes.

Hiromi: Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure if it’s necessarily ‘jazz’, but there definitely is like this new interest in improvisational music with many different elements. I see, you know, younger generations really enjoy playing this new style and they are reaching a high level. I think it’s beautiful.

PAN M 360: Was the score for Blue Giant your last work? With anime too, there seems to be a lot of interest in jazz, with shows like Sakamichi no Apollon and Cowboy Bebop.

Hiromi: Yeah that’s true. Manga, the animation, you know is huge in Japan. And the original cartoon, which was based on this feature film Blue Giant, was very popular among all generations really. And with this movie, I see that a younger generation have started to watch it and really get into it and the soundtrack. It seems to be a great outlet for them to be able to know this music and get inspired. It was really a great opportunity for me to be able to score for this.