6/14 Hidemi Aikawa (solo piano)

Hidemi Aikawa, piano

Hidemi Akaiwa is a Japanese pianist/composer. She started on piano at the age of three and as a youth won many classical music competitions.

At the age of 30, Akaiwa shifted from a successful corporate career to jazz music. She was awarded a full scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music, where she participated in the Global Jazz Institute, Jazz and Gender Justice Program and Planet MicroJam Institute. While at Berklee, Akaiwa received the prestigious Toshiko Akiyoshi Composition Award. She has had the privilege to study with world-class musicians Danilo Perez, Terri Lyne Carrington, Billy Childs, Kenny Werner, Joe Lovano, Tiger Okoshi and many others.

She graduated from New England Conservatory for Master’s Degree and has performed with Tim Berne, Bruno Raberg, Kris Davis, Anna Webber, Francisco Mela, Nicole Mitchell, Joe Morris, Ingrid Laubrock, and so on. She is currently a member of the Screaming Headless Torsos and co-leads Japanese Microjam with David Fiuczynski.

Akaiwa’s passion is to create a new art form, infusing the principles of Japanese Zen with the sounds of jazz and contemporary classical music. She combines Japanese microtonal techniques with Western theoretical constructs using synthesizers and acoustic instruments that utilize microtonal vocabularies.

As an interdisciplinary artist, she has performed at festivals in the USA, Italy, Ecuador, China, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Norway, and other countries, as well as in museums such as MoMA (New York), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the MIT Media Lab.

Her message to the universe is, “It is never too late to chase dreams that emanate from your soul.”