Music Unites Everything: Hiromi in Sonic Wonderland

As she performed her song called “Yes! Ramen!!” last summer at Rome's House of Jazz, Hiromi did something that few other jazz pianists do but is the norm for her: She ran in place as she played — not just for a moment but for full stretches of time as she lifted her feet up and down from the stage and the audience gyrated with her. “Yes! Ramen!!” pays playful homage to the noodles that are an everyday staple in Hiromi's native Japan, and the song has explicit Japanese-sounding riffs, but those riffs meld into the wider miasma of the song itself — with "miasma" an appropriate word since Hiromi’s performances are musically volcanic. Is there another jazz pianist today who will pound the keyboards with their fists (as Hiromi did during her 2021 Summer Olympics performance) and play with such passion, playfulness, and undeniable joie de vivre?

Seeing Hiromi in performance — as SFJAZZ fans can do from April 17-20 — is to experience an artist whose manner and mindset will remind them of jazz's long history of standout jazz pianists, including Thelonious Monk, whose on-stage dancing became a hallmark of his improvisational performances. Like Monk and other jazz iconoclasts, though, Hiromi is hard to classify musically since her influences are many — everything from classical music to funk to, yes, such non-musical goings-on as eating ramen in a crowded noodle stop in Tokyo. For Hiromi, anything goes in her songs, which is especially true on her latest album, Out There, and with her latest group, called Sonicwonder — a lineup of musicians from different geographies whose fidelity to both jazz traditions and musical rules-breaking matches Hiromi's. Being funny is part of their approach.

"I always believe that humor belongs to music," Hiromi tells me by phone from Tokyo, before she embarked on an international tour that, before San Francisco, took her to Thailand, China, Canada, and across the United States, and will then take her back to Japan before continuing in Turkey and Europe. "I love that people smile when I play. And I'm always smiling when I listen to my favorite music. So it's just naturally comes to my music sometimes. Here and there, there's a humoristic part — with the sound sonically as well."

"The motif of “Yes! Ramen!!” is more humoristic," she adds. "That song has more Asian scales and harmonies, because ramen is from my country, and I wanted to use that scale with humor. I'm naturally Japanese, and I'm born and raised here, and it's natural that my music is influenced by Japan, but I never wanted to artificially put any Japanese-ness into my music. I don't force it, but I don't deny it."

Hiromi's new international tour is emblematic of her now-foundational place in jazz circles: That of an internationally recognized recording artist whose home is everywhere that musical borders are ignored. She can be thought of as a "jazz" artist, but it's her willingness to blend genres that appeals to her fans, and to fellow genre-benders like bassist Stanley Clarke, the five-time GRAMMY winner whose jazz fusion includes his 2009 album Jazz in the Garden and his 2010 release The Stanley Clarke Band, both of which feature Hiromi. Last year at SFJAZZ, Clarke performed a series of on-stage duets with Hiromi — a tandem of just piano and bass that Clarke says few other pianists could have pulled off. Many professional jazz pianists, Clarke tells me, aren't capable of adequately performing in a live duo format that demands intense concentration, immediate improvisation, and the ability to be truly authentic before a musically educated audience that can sense the difference between authenticity and adequacy.

"Not every jazz pianist can play a duet with a bass player — especially someone like me," Clarke says in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "The pianist has to be the drummer and the orchestra and the 'this'— and I have to be the drummer and the orchestra. So, to play duet, and to play it properly, and to play it very powerfully — man! Your confidence and all the fundamentals of music — rhythm, harmony, and everything else — has to be really, really, really at a high level. And I can honestly say that I prefer playing duets with her more so than many other piano players. A pianist will tell you (for example) that not all piano players are trio players. As much as you might like, say, Herbie Hancock or McCoy Tyner or others, they didn't do a lot of trio albums. And there's a reason: You have to have a feel for that. It's a thing. And duet is even harder."

Jazz in the Garden was a trio album that also featured drummer Lenny White, but Hiromi's April SFJAZZ performances will feature a quartet structure: Hiromi on piano, Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Hadrien Feraud on bass, and Gene Coye on drums. Their collaboration debuted on the 2023 album Sonicwonderland, and Out There continues their exploration of themes that could be called "movement centered," as with songs like “OUT THERE: Takin' Off,” which crisscrosses tempos that both speed up and slow down before delivering a crescendo of notes that include sonic whirls; and “Balloon Pop,” whose playful, almost kid-like intro segues into a full-out sprint where every musician gets a chance to groove. “Yes! Ramen!!” also anchors Hiromi's new album, but she showcases a more contemplative side with “Pendulum,” where singer Michelle Willis — sounding like a young Joni Mitchell — joins the group for a tune about love and relationships ("the more I give, the more you go") that echoes with angst and resolve.

With “Pendulum,” Hiromi shows she can reduce things to a musical crawl, but completely slowing down — whether on a song or in her life — doesn't seem to be in her DNA, which explains a crucial event that led to her first big break: At age 17, after studying music all her young life, Hiromi was visiting Tokyo to take lessons when she learned that Chick Corea was visiting the city, and she insisted on getting to see him — which she managed to do, and to show him how well she already played. Corea's reaction? He invited her to attend his Tokyo concert — and then called her on stage to perform improvisations before the audience. Soon after, Hiromi came to the United States to study at Boston's Berklee College of Music, and not long after that Corea recommended Hiromi to Clarke, who then asked her to join him on tour.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities to play in the world because the audiences are so into music, and the response they have for music is so musical. They go with the flow, and I love that. I really feel like we are making the music together.

"She had a reputation in Japan but not the United States," Clarke says. "When she toured with me, it might have been her first time being exposed to large audiences. I remember we played a festival — maybe it was New Orleans — and I'll never forget when people first saw her. . .. She's not average in any way; her scope is broad. She has a classical thing, her technique is a force in itself, and she has her own music and her own way of playing. I always like people who sound like themselves because it tells me about their character since it's very easy to copy Herbie Hancock, copy McCoy Tyner, and copy someone else. And I have nothing against guys who do that, but I also know that all of us are individuals — and that we're different — so when someone is very unique, that means that person to me has a lot of confidence in themselves, and they don't have a lot of fear of being themselves. And that's what Hiromi has."

That lack of fear is why Hiromi is constantly searching for new ways to play jazz — and new ways to surprise not just audiences but herself. "I'm always learning. It's a never-ending road for the musician. If you stop learning, that's the end," she told me, adding this about returning to San Francisco: "San Francisco is one of my favorite cities to play in the world because the audiences are so into music, and the response they have for music is so musical. They go with the flow, and I love that. I really feel like we are making the music together. It's almost not like, 'We're the performers, and there's an audience.' I feel like each one (there) is a performer. I always have an amazing experience when I'm in San Francisco."

At age 45, Hiromi is young for someone who has already released more than a dozen albums. Among her many accomplishments: Conceiving and performing the soundtrack for Blue Giant, the popular Japanese manga series about an aspirational jazz player, which was turned into an animated film in 2023. Even before graduating from the Berklee College of Music, where Ahmad Jamal was one of her mentors, Hiromi had signed a record deal.

Hiromi doesn't just play a traditional piano. During performances, she also incorporates electronic keyboards, which let her reach across the kind of sonic spectrum that produces the playful scales you hear with “Balloon Pop.” It's those non-traditional jazz sounds that can get Hiromi and her audiences really going since they evoke jazz's constant evolution. Her new album features a remake of “XYZ,” a song on her first release in 2003 that on her new album is even more frenetic and freewheeling — with O’Farrill's trumpet, Feraud's bass, and Coye's drums all matching Hiromi's piano step for step and note for note. O’Farrill, Feraud, and Coye may not have been literally running in place the way Hiromi does, but they're just as volcanic. That's why she chose them to form a group. Feraud is from France, while O'Farrill and Coye are from different parts of the United States — O'Farrill is a Brooklyn native (whose grandfather was Cuban musician Chico O'Farrill), and Coye is a native of Evanston, Illinois who lives now in Los Angeles. Asked about the group's international makeup, Hiromi says that's just a byproduct of searching for the right musicians to play with. It doesn't matter where a musician is from, she says. It's where they're going that matters — a view that parallels the one that Corea seemed to take with her many years ago in Tokyo.

"It just happens to be that, and I think it's beautiful," Hiromi says of her band's international composition. "I'm happy that it happens to be that, because I think music really goes beyond anything — gender, generation, race, anything. Music unites everything."

About her bounciness on stage, Hiromi says: "It was always there. Now, playing three keyboards — piano and two keyboards on top of it — I'm playing with effects and pedals, so it's more of an electric-based band. But even when I play solo piano, I tend to play with such a style — even with one piano. It's just something natural that I do. I never try or force myself to do it. I didn't even realize what I was doing until I see myself on video. I don't know — I can't help it, I guess."

Hiromi lets out a small laugh as she says that — nothing as loud or demonstrative as her music, but still a distinctive sound that speaks loudly about the full range of feeling that she channels onto stages and onto her albums, as with the more contemplative song “Pendulum.”

"Anyone is multidimensional. There's one side of me that loves humor, and there's one side of me that's more like the “Pendulum” song," she says, adding, "I never really thought about, 'I want to be an international piano player.' I just wanted to play the piano. It's an instrument that is universal. It's a universal language. There are no lyrics. Those sounds go to everyone in the same language."

Hiromi's Sonicwonder performs 4/17-20. Tickets and more information are available here. The 4/18 concert will be streamed on Fridays Live. More information is available here.

Jonathan Curiel is a San Francisco journalist who writes about music and other subjects, and has taught at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.