![Improvising & Experimental Music of Ottawa and Outwards. [2010 to 2023]](https://www.improvisedmoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMOOLogoHighQuality-e1662557657744.png)
Performing at General Assembly (5 Fairmont Avenue), Friday September 21st 7:00pm.
- Natsuki Tamura – Solo Trumpet
“Natsuki Tamura’s trumpet has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late 60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of W. Leo Smith and Lester Bowie.” ― Mark Keresman, JazzReview.com
Japanese trumpeter and composer NATSUKI TAMURA is internationally recognized for a unique musical vocabulary that blends extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso’s seemingly limitless creativity led François Couture in All Music Guide to declare that “… we can officially say there are two Natsuki Tamuras: The one playing angular jazz-rock or ferocious free improv… and the one writing simple melodies of stunning beauty… How the two of them live in the same body and breathe through the same trumpet might remain a mystery.”
Born on July 26, 1951, in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, Tamura first picked up the trumpet while performing in his junior high brass band. He began his professional music career after he graduated from high school, playing in numerous bands including the World Sharps Orchestra, Consolation, Skyliners Orchestra, New Herd Orchestra, Music Magic Orchestra, and the Satoko Fujii Ensemble, as well as in his own ensemble. He was the trumpeter for numerous national television shows in Japan from 1973–1982, including The Best Ten, Music Fair, Kirameku Rhythm and many others.
In 1986, he came to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music. He then returned to his native Japan to perform and teach at the Yamaha Popular Music School and at private trumpet studios in Tokyo and Saitama, before coming back to the US to study at New England Conservatory. He made his debut recording as a leader in 1992 on Tobifudo.
In 1998, Tamura began recording his unaccompanied solo performances. The stunning solo trumpet debut release, A Song for Jyaki earned a Writers Choice 1998 in Coda magazine, and Andy Bartlett wrote in Coda, “A fabulous set of hiccuping leaps, drones and post-bop trumpet hi-jinx. Tamura goes from growling lows to fluid, free solo runs and echoes not only Don Cherry’s slurring anti-virtuosic chops but also Kenny Wheeler’s piercing highwire fullness.” He followed it up in 2003 with KoKoKoKe, which Jon Davis described in Exposé as “Buddhist chants from an alien planet.” Grego Applegate Edwards explains that on Tamura’s most recent solo album, 2013’s Dragon Nat, “he pares down to focus on simple unwinding melodic material, the sound of his trumpet as a sensuous thing, a periodicity. Taken as a whole it is a kind of environmental tone poem for the moment Natsuki is in now.”
“You’ll never fit trumpeter Natsuki Tamura into any pre-fab category,” wrote Dan McClenaghan in All About Jazz. “He creates his own, then pulls you into them with him.” It is this category-defying ability that makes him, as Marc Chenard said in Coda, “unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today.”
