Music: Jazz Import

When she opened in Manhattan last week, a pressagent told Toshiko that she should wear a kimono all the time because she was, after all, the only female jazz pianist from Japan. As a concession, she wears a kimono on Saturday nights (the obi is apt to be too tight for really freewheeling playing, she complains), but the rest of the time she performs in Western cocktail dresses. Behind the piano at the Hickory House, across the way from West 52nd Street’s sagging strip joints, Toshiko Akiyoshi demonstrates that she need not rely on costume for her success. Her own songs—Between Me and Myself, Kyo-Shu (Nostalgia), Blues for Toshiko—come out with a wide, swinging, masculine beat that reminds some listeners of Bud Powell; the rhythmic ideas spin out loose-linked and limber, hazed with a nostalgic mist as delicate as watered silk. It is clearly some of the best jazz piano around.

Back home in Japan, Pianist Toshiko, 27, used to listen to all of them on records —Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie. She would take down the melodies and try to decide why they improvised as they did. Her father was an industrialist in Manchuria, and she studied classical piano there until the family was forced to return to Japan by the Chinese civil war. Toshiko prepared for medical school, but when she got a job playing with a dance band at the U.S. Army officers’ club, she decided she wanted to be a pianist instead of a doctor. Over family objections at first, she played in nightclubs and coffeehouses, later appeared twice as a guest with the Tokyo Philharmonic. On the strength of a recording she made, Toshiko managed to get a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music in Boston. She now spends her winters studying piano, composition and arrangement, her summers touring, her free moments composing.

Eventually, Toshiko would like to go back to Japan: “The position of the jazz musician there is so low now that I feel a responsibility to do something about it. I’d like to go back and start an orchestra for the movies, and once a month or so we could present a jazz concert.” But she knows also that Japan is not a challenging place for developing jazz talent; the competition is too thin. “When you push against a wall,” says Toshiko, “you know you are pushing. When you push a curtain, it gives way.”

In Manhattan she is pushing the wall with the best in town.