Hiroshima Rises from the Abyss

Jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi recently said "farewell" to playing concerts with a big band, with a big bang. Akiyoshi's three-decade retrospective concert at Carnegie Hall featured her suite, "Hiroshima Rising from the Ashes," recorded there in August, 2001 and recently released for the first time in the US. The 73-year-old Akiyoshi was raised in Manchuria and returned to Japan shortly after the end of WWII. Ten years later, she arrived in Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music. By the sixties she was performing with Charlie Mariano and Charles Mingus, and in 1973 she formed her big band with husband and tenor saxophonist, Lew Tabackin.

Akiyoshi wrote "Hiroshima" at the request of a Buddhist monk from Hiroshima, who wanted music to memorialize that town's day in history. He sent Akiyoshi photographs taken shortly after the atomic bomb blasted that destroyed the city.

In the August 21, 2003 Wall Street Journal, producer Nat Hentoff writes that Akiyoshi was particularly struck by one picture of a young woman coming out of a bomb shelter, looking at the sky, "smiling a little with beautiful eyes full of hope."

In one section of the suite, a student reads from "Mother's Diaries," eyewitness accounts of the deaths and disfigurements caused by the explosion, fire and radiation. According to Hentoff, Tabackin's flute solo in the finale, "Wishing Peace," is so moving that Akiyoshi reports that "tears come to my eyes when we perform it."

Akiyoshi is planning to use her retirement from big band touring to concentrate on her piano playing.

Read the Jazz Loft review of Akiyoshi's recording, or browse it at Amazon.com (which also includes listener reviews)

Read the New York Times review of the farewell concert

Read a bio of Akiyoshi from Duke University and the BBC