Meg Okura’s Multicultural Identity

By Kira Grunenberg I Oct. 29, 2024

“I truly do love learning the history and what came before, and that’s what I practice,” says Meg Okura, pictured here with Kevin Hays. “But that’s not necessarily what I do as a composer.”
(Photo: Tracy Yang)

Japanese native Meg Okura is a New York City-based Jewish-American composer and violinist. A graduate of Juilliard with two degrees in violin performance, Okura has steadily risen in the international jazz community, beginning in the early 1990s, and over the years has become intimately familiar with the significance placed on identity in music.

However, this awareness hasn’t stopped her from embracing all of her musical gifts, regardless of style. It’s a choice that in just a handful of years has led Okura to a copious amount of awards and recognition for her work, including 2022 and 2024 BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Awards; 2021 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music & Theater; 2021 Jazz Road Creative Residency; 2020 Copland House Residency Award; 2018 Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant and more. Amid all of these honors, Okura has released Lingering, a new duo debut album with pianist Kevin Hays, a longtime collaborator.

Released via Adhyâropa Records, Lingering puts Okura’s artistic instincts as a composer, improvisor and collaborator on display across 14 original tracks: 12 by Okura and two by Hays. Though a soundly awarded jazz artist — this year, Okura won four different composition competitions for classical work and five for jazz — it’s difficult to hear Okura’s playing and writing styles and not wonder how her familiarity with classical and jazz come into play on the album. One minute she’s delicately blending notes of harmonic double-stops on “Will You Hear My Voice?” The next, she’s employing frantic three-finger pizzicato, playing a flurry of notes in a way Okura likens to “how a bass guitarist would do it” on Kevin Hays’ “Improvisation #1.”

“I’m not really thinking, ‘OK, let’s do a classical thing here and let’s do a jazz thing here.’ But when you’re doing something like [writing music], you try to access all of your resources, knowledge and experience,” Okura says. “It’s more like, ‘What can I do with these materials?’ A lot of the time, what I hear already has a combination of different styles.”

Drawing on an abundance of stylistic inspirations may seem predictable based on Okura’s musically diverse experience. However, her very approach to nurturing new ideas comes from another remarkable gift: perfect pitch. Often romanticized as a rare key to better performance, easier writing and flawless tuning, this innate ability isn’t a cheat code. That said, in Okura’s case, there are definite benefits. For her, it’s more about composing than tonal refinement, specifically when it comes to trying to capture lightning in a bottle.

“I do hear a lot of things in my head so as far as composition goes; I can write where there is no piano,” Okura explains. “I live in New York City, so I’d take the subway or I’d be waiting for something and in that time, I can kind of compose in my head, and I can chart [the music] out.”

When it came to working on Lingering in the studio, especially tracking alongside Hays, Okura’s tonal awareness and compositional instincts served as a complementary support whenever the duo played through an improvised motif or crafted a progression. “Coming from classical, I didn’t have the background of improvising based on jazz harmony training,” says Okura. “So for me, [perfect pitch] has been very useful for [Lingering] and working with Kevin.

“We would leave an open improvisation section so [Kevin] could go to another chord, another key center, and I have to catch it. Whatever note he plays, I can emulate, go with it or create a chord with what he’s playing.”

Though this scene sounds like an effortless exchange between the duo, Okura doesn’t discount the value of good old-fashioned studying and practice — her mastery of pitch merely serving as support rather than a main character that enables her to compose or stay in sync with Hays.

“It’s been very important that I acquire more knowledge and study harmony, especially when I first started improvising,” says Okura. “I was using my ears, then I had to start studying harmony so I could play chord changes. Like with bebop, you change every two beats. With [John Coltrane’s] ‘Giant Steps,’ there’s no way you can wait until you hear it [to figure out chord changes].

“I truly do love learning the history and what came before, and that’s what I practice. But that’s not necessarily what I do as a composer. I don’t try to emulate what came before. I try to be authentic and not deny what I’ve studied and all of my backgrounds as a composer.”

Okura’s very relationship with music itself has been intertwined with her quest for full authenticity for years, even from the early days of her group, the Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble — far preceding Lingering or even her 10-year collaborative relationship with Hays. “When I first started the Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble [in 2006], I used all of my multiple cultural and musical identities as an inspiration, in order to write original music,” she says.

Though Lingering is the latest display of Okura finding new ways to write music that feels authentic to herself, how she pursues that feeling has changed with her perspective about how performing and composing jazz fit into her life. “Today it’s kind of the opposite,” she says. “I use music and the processes like composing and improvising in order to make sense of my rather complicated identity. In jazz composition I find solace.”

The music of Lingering has put Okura’s newfound inner peace into the spotlight. Not only that but over the whole process of reflection, composition, collaboration and performance to make this improvisatory record, she has uncovered freshly charged positivity about herself and the music she makes going forward, undeterred by prohibitive traditions or impossible expectations.

“I can embrace all of my backgrounds and feel accepted and feel at home,” Okura says. “Truly at home.” DB