Interview with Chiemi Nakai: I don’t know … Video

Jazz interview with jazz pianist, composer and arranger Chiemi Nakai. An interview by email in writing.

JazzBluesNews.com: – When you improvise, you know where you’re going. It’s a matter of taking certain paths and certain directions?

Chiemi Nakai: – I don’t know where to go. What I am intending is that how I can express/release my energy/passion to audience with my musicians. My music arrangement is prey ghtly formaed and I leave a solo space which has 4-8 bars with nicely touching Jazzy chord progression, which is not whole chorus solo usually Jazz has.

JBN: – Do you ever get the feeling that music majors, and parcularly people who are going into jazz, are being cranked out much like business majors? That they are not really able to express themselves as jazz musicians?

CHN: – I don’t think so. Some young students who graduated jazz music majors are truly talented technically and musically. Even I think recent young generaon are more advanced than the past generaon like us. Maybe because youth already have been influenced by a lot of musical informaon by new technology.

JBN: – What about somebody who is really gied and puts together a band and just gets upset to the point of quing because of the business aspects-the agents and the clubs?

CHN: – It is really unique queson. I remembered a friend of mine who graduated at an expensive music college in Boston(You know what I’m talking about, right?) and became a Jazz singer, but she gave it up because she couldn’t live with this. Then she started teaching kids business and has been successful so far. She was upset about the gigs at restaurants or clubs in the city paid ridiculously small. I think she was lucky to find the business that she could connue. Me? I’ve been doing musician since I was in early 20s. Music is my mission and I can’t do anything but music; performance, wring music, making music, teaching music, etc…

JBN: – How to prevent disparate influences from coloring what you’re doing?

CHN: – I don’t know what you mean…

JBN: – What’s the balance in music between intellect and soul?

CHN: – 20% and 80%

JBN: – There’s a two-way rela onship between audience and ar st; you’re okay with giving the people what they want?

CHN: – Depend on the situaon. But recently I seldom play the gigs that I will give the people what they want.

JBN: – Please any memories from gigs, jams, open acts and studio sessions which you’d like to share with us?

CHN: – It was a blast performance at Rockwood Music Hall on June 5, 2019 and Birdland on August 8, 2019. The both were full house! Hooray!

JBN: – How can we get young people interested in jazz when most of the standard tunes are half a century old?

CHN: – Recreate the jazz standards funky and sophiscatedly.

JBN: – And lastly, being a teacher, do you find it difficult to write music yourself?

CHN: – Though I don’t get the point of this queson, to write music is not di cult for me….

JBN: – How important is it to you to have an original approach? Can you comment on the bridge between being a musician and being a composer?

CHN: – Being a musician: to concentrate to improve myself to be as a best performer, being a composer: to write scores & charts, to edit them, to have rehearsals with musicians/bands, to lead them, etc…

JBN: – Do you have an idea of what it is you’re trying to say or get across? Is it an idea or is it just something that we feel?

CHN: – Neither an idea nor feeling. I wanted to push myself up from the hard situaon that I had been facing for the past 10 years.

JBN: – What do you see for your extended future? You know what you have going on? You have life? If you could change one thing in the musical world and it would become a reality, what would that be?

CHN: – I plan to release an original Salsa song with Spanish lyrics to all of the world in 2021. My future dream plan is going to release a Solo Piano album, mainly playing Jazz standards and Cuban/Lan tradional standards.

JBN: – Who do you find yourself listening to these days?

CHN: – I don’t understand the meaning of this question…

JBN: – What is the message you choose to bring through your music?

CHN: – What we can do is not to give up the situaon that we face even if it looks hard.

JBN: – Let’s take a trip with a me machine, so where and why would you really wanna go?

CHN: – I don’t want to go to the past. I am interested in the future only.

JBN: – I have been asking you so far, now may I have a queson from yourself…

CHN: – What is the most your favourite CD? Why do you like it?

JBN: – Thanks for your incomprehensible non-intellectual answers, by no means yours rubbish …

JBN: – So pung that all together, how are you able to harness that now?

CHN: – It is very good for me to write/express myself like this; to know more and beer myself, to accept myself more, to love myself more and more. Thank you for giving me this opportunity!

Interview by Simon Sargsyan