JO | HA | KYU Part II

Kaoru Watanabe, a Brooklyn-based composer and practitioner of the Japanese taiko drum and shinobue bamboo flutes, is known for artfully combining traditional ritual and theater musics of Japan with complex compositional and improvisational elements of jazz and other global musics. Kaoru was a performing member and artistic director of the iconic Japanese taiko performing arts group Kodo for close to a decade. Since leaving Kodo, Watanabe has collaborated with such luminaries as Japanese National Living Treasure Bando Tamasaburo, MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran, So Percussion, director Martin Scorsese and was a featured artist on Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble’s Grammy Award winning album Sing Me Home. Watanabe has performed his compositions at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Whitney Museum and Kabukiza and has performed extensively across the North, Central and South Americas, Europe, Australia, Asia.

As an educator, Kaoru has taught courses at Princeton and Wesleyan Universities, was a faculty member at the Tanglewood Music Festival and the Silk Road Project’s Global Musician Workshop at DePauw University. He is an instructor for kaDON, an online resource presented by Japan’s most prestigious taiko maker Miyamoto Unosuke Shoten. His studio in Brooklyn hosts private lessons, rehearsals, weekly classes, intensive workshops and professional-level training courses offered by both Watanabe and master guest instructors from Japan.

Hailed by Jazz Times magazine for his “great dexterity,” and cited by critic Thomas Conrad for his musicality, New York bassist and composer Edward Perez is sought by fellow musicians for his creativity and experience in a great diversity of musical styles. Perez’s bass lines have been the choice of a stunning array of bandleaders including jazz vocal legend Mark Murphy, latin-jazz Grammy nominees HectorMartignon and Jane Bunnett, Colombian singer Lucia Pulido, trumpet virtuoso Joe Burgstaller of the Canadian Brass, and a host of modern jazz musicians including Martin Bejerano, Benito Gonzalez, Jason Palmer, Anat Cohen, Francisco Mela, and Gilad Hekselman.

Perez’s unique sound as a composer traces back to the combination of his grounding in modern jazz and straight ahead combined with insight on percussion and traditional afro-latin music gleaned from his two years in Lima as well as his experience with latin jazz heavyweights of New York City. His second latest release, The Year of Two Summers, features his own compositions as played by Eli Degibri, Misha Piatigorsky, Willard Dyson, Arturo Stable, and guests Sofia Koutsovitis and Morris Cañate. Perez also directs Alcatraz, an afro-Peruvian band that has released a self-titled album and has performed throughout the northeastern US.

As a sideman and bassist, Perez has performed in virtually all of New York’s most venerated jazz venues, including the Blue Note, Lincoln Center, Jazz Standard, Iridium, Dizzy’s, Jazz Gallery, Zinc Bar, Smalls, Smoke, Fat Cat, Tonic, 55 Bar, and Nuyorican Poets Café. He has toured throughout Europe, South America, and Japan, including appearances in major jazz festivals such as Vitoria, Moers, and Palau de la Musica (Valencia), as well as world music festivals such as Stimmen and Rudolstadt. In addition to the aforementioned bandleaders, Perez has shared the stage or recorded with such jazz luminaries as Lee Konitz, Seamus Blake, Mark Turner, Kenny Werner, Phil Woods, Lionel Loueke, and Perico Sambeat.

Brazilian percussionist and educator Rogério Boccato plays in projects led by some of today’s leading jazz players, among them Maria Schneider, John Patitucci, Fred Hersch, Danilo Perez, Ben Allison, Kevin Hays, among many others. He has also collaborated with top-ranking Brazilian artists, such as Toninho Horta, Dori Caymmi, Moacir Santos, and Vinicius Cantuária.

He is featured on Grammy-award winning album “The Thompson Fields“, with the Maria Schneider Orchestra, and also on two Grammy-nominated ones: Kenny Garrett’s “Beyond The Wall” and John Patitucci‘s release “Remembrance“, alongside Joe Lovano and Brian Blade.

As a longtime member of the “Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo”, Brazilian percussionist Rogério Boccato has played with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Hermeto Pascoal, Milton Nascimento, Egberto Gismonti, João Bosco, Joe Zawinul, among many others.

Rogério Boccato has been a faculty member of the Manhattan School of Music and of the Percussion department of The Hartt School (University of Hartford) teaching Brazilian Music and Ritmica.

He has been presenting clinics on Brazilian music, focusing on traditional Brazilian rhythms and styles applied to the drum set and to Jazz combo, which have been enthusiastically received at universities around the United States, Mexico and Portugal.

Vitor Gonçalves is a pianist, accordionist, composer and arranger from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After an illustrious career as an in demand musician in Brazil, playing with such icons as Hermeto Pascoal, Maria Bethânia, Itiberê Zwarg, and many others, he made the move to New York City, where he currently resides.

Since arriving here in 2012, he has garnered much acclaim and built a star lighted resume, including features in NPR’s Jazz Night in America, hosted by Christian McBride, The New York Times, and Fox News. A frequent resident on the stages of Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Jazz Standard, and the Jazz Gallery, he both leads his own projects, and collaborates with figures in the New York scene such as Anat Cohen, Vinícius Cantuária, Anthony Wilson, Cyro Baptista, and others.

He also has played in Jazz Festivals and venues around the world, such as Newport Jazz, Jazz à Vienne, Umbria Jazz Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and the Coliseum in Lisbon, Portugal.

Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Vitor was infused with the rich traditions and colorful history of Brazilian music, taking up the guitar as his first instrument at age 10. As he dug deeper into his studies, he developed a taste for the music of the Brazilian songbook, particularly of Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Bossa Nova and Post-Bossa generation. During this time, his father bought a keyboard for his sister, and while she never played it, Vitor stole into her room and took it over, and thus became a pianist.

At age 18, he was tapped by Itiberê Zwarg, a longtime collaborator of the musical genius Hermeto Pascoal, to form an orchestra of young musicians, to follow the lineage of his mentor’s musical concepts. In this group, people were encouraged to play multiple instruments, so, as it was, Vitor took up the saxophone as a tertiary instrument. It was in this environment that Vitor found the beginnings of his musical personality and his own voice– an environment that is rooted in the diversity of Brazilian culture, its rhythms, traditions and rituals, and expressed with a complete palette of harmonic colors, with a great emphasis on freedom and improvisation.

Concurrently, Vitor began forming his own groups, and collaborating with many others besides. “Bamboo” and “Inventos” (in which he also played saxophone) are collectives that sprouted out of Itibere’s Orchestra, and continue to make records and play internationally to this day. Living in Rio he had the chance to work as an accordionist and pianist in the Choro, Samba, Forró and Jazz scenes, sharing the stage with masters like Paulo Moura, Zé da Velha, Elza Soares, Emílio Santiago, and Idriss Boudrioua, providing him a rich and diverse background that he still explores and recreates in his own musical statements. From 2008 to 2011, he was part of the legendary singer Maria Bethânia’s band, with whom he recorded two albums, a DVD, and toured the most prestigious venues in the world.

Vitor moved to New York in 2012 to deepen his pursuit of Jazz and its connection with Brazilian music, and to explore the diverse musical melting pot that is New York City. It is here that he began leading his own group and forming new collectives, while pursuing a Masters Degree in Jazz at City College. His Quartet features his own compositions and songs of the Brazilian repertoire, rearranged and reinterpreted with a sense of space and freedom. Featured in his quartet are Dan Weiss (drums), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Todd Neufeld (guitar). With this group Vitor has just finished his debut album, to be released in the fall on Sunnyside Records. Other collective groups he currently is a part are “SanfoNYa Brasileira”, an accordion trio with Eduardo Belo on bass and Vanderlei Pereira on drums, and “Regional de NY”, one of the USA’s top Choro groups.

Belinda Becker is a triple threat as DJ, dancer, and actor. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Belinda is well-known in the NYC DJ scene, spinning at such clubs including, Area, Nells, La Esquina, Spur Tree, and on Radio Lily. She has been studying and performing Haitian Folklore, and Afro-Cuban dance for over 20 years under Pat Hall and Baba Richard Gonzalez. Dance companies include: The Pat Hall Dancers, Bonga and Voudou Drums of Haiti, La Troupe Makandal, and Urban Tap. Film and television credits include: Law & Order, Left Unsaid, Love Room and Sticky Fingers of Time. Belinda lives in Brooklyn with her beautiful daughter Willow.

Native of Japan, Fumi Tanakadate is a taiko artist and pianist based in New York. Drawn to the artistry of Kaoru Watanabe, she has been studying taiko under him since 2011. Having a unique combination of an extensive musical expertise in European Classical music and a background in traditional folk dancing, drumming and flute playing from her local festival in Japan, she quickly became one Watanabe’s top disciples and collaborators, performing music that aims to blend the nostalgic sound of Japanese traditional festival and theater and the interplay of complex jazz improvisations. She has performed at Joe’s Pub, ShapeShifter Lab, Nublu, National Sawdust and Pioneer Works. Fumi has collaborated with Yuu Ishizuka, Sumie Kaneko, Shane Shanahan, Chieko Kojima, On Ensemble, Alicia Hall Moran and Satoshi Takeishi and performed in Kenny Endo’s 40th Anniversary Tour. Most recently, she toured with Kaoru Watanabe and Yuta Sumiyoshi of KODO as a trio.
Fumi also serves as the primary instructor at Kaoru Watanabe Taiko Center, teaching classes and giving educational workshops at local schools and colleges. Her former teachers include Rogerio Boccato and Mark Soskin. She has taken workshops and lessons with Kenny Endo, Chieko Kojima, Patrick Graham, and Tetsuro Naito, and Yuu Ishizuka.

As a classical pianist, Fumi has performed throughout Japan, tri-state area, Austria, and Spain. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Wesleyan University and a Master of Music degree in piano performance from Manhattan School of Music.