Miho Hazama Earns Attention She Deserves

By Paul de Barros I Feb. 1, 2022

“I wanted to start thinking of something larger than this world,” says Miho Hazama.
(Photo: Craig Lovell)

They say good things happen in threes, and for 35-year-old New York composer and bandleader Miho Hazama that certainly applies. In 2019, she got her first Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble with her album Dancer In Nowhere, was appointed chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band — the first woman ever to hold that post — and received a commission for the Monterey Jazz Festival, one she premiered this year.

“It’s been challenging, of course,” said Hazama, with a disarming smile, over breakfast this past September in Monterey, “but it’s a big challenge, and I like it.”

Hazama’s has been a long and unusual journey. Born in Tokyo, she started playing keyboards at age 5, went on to study classical composition at the Kunitachi College of Music, with “special study” in film scoring, and initially had her sights set on the movies. But when computers became de riguer in film, Hazama refocused, turning her attention to the jazz composers she was hearing while playing piano in her college big band, writers like Jim McNeely, Maria Schneider and Mike Holober.

“I was just in love with their music,” she recalled. “Computer music? I don’t know. But this? It’s wonderful. And they’re alive and active. I figured, I can’t meet Stravinsky, but I can meet Jim McNeely.”

Wasting no time, Hazama moved to New York in 2010 to study with McNeely at the Manhattan School of Music, where she received a master’s degree in 2012 and formed a 13-piece jazz-classical hybrid orchestra for her graduation recital that would become the model for her regular band, m_unit — two brass (including French horn), three reeds, four rhythm and string quartet. M_unit issued its debut album, Journey To Journey, in 2012, followed by Time River and Dancer In Nowhere, all on Sunnyside and available in various formats today. Schneider, who gave workshops at Manhattan, became an early advocate and recommended her for the Monterey commission.

“From the moment I first heard Miho’s writing, I loved the surprises and contrasts she found,” Schneider wrote in an email. “I’m just so happy to see her music get the attention that it deserves.”

Like Schneider, Hazama integrates composed and improvised material as she develops her ideas, scoring with individual players in mind.

“I sketch a lot,” she said. “Then once I start writing, I’m already hearing that guy’s sound — say, [baritone saxophonist] Andrew Gutauskas — his notes. That’s how I orchestrate it. I mean, I don’t make any sounds. I feel like I have to be a good producer. That’s how I think.”

The commissioned piece, Exoplanet Suite — a cinematic three-parter with raucous changeups of meter, inventive timbral blends and passages of celebratory joy and quiet, celestial beauty — was premiered at Monterey and inspired by the frustration she felt at the negative insularity she and her colleagues fell into during the pandemic.

“I was just so sick of the online behavior of human beings on this planet,” she said. “Everyone went kind of crazy and was complaining all the time. I felt, ‘This is no good.’ I wanted to start thinking of something larger than this world. And I realized how small human beings actually are.”

The Monterey crowd enthusiastically took her point, leaping to its feet after the piece and again at the end of her extended set, which showcased Gutauskas’ explosive baritone saxophone, as well as a deliciously knotty viola solo by Atsuki Yoshida, sweeping, harp-like improvisations from pianist Billy Test, biting solos from trumpeter Josh Deutsch, and keening alto and soprano saxophone work by Ethan Helm.

Hazama flew to Monterey from Tokyo the day before the show. She flew to Copenhagen the day after. That’s the kind of life she’s been leading since 2019, bouncing all year between Asia, Europe and North America.

When asked if she follows any regime to stay healthy, she laughed. “No. And my mom is really pissed off about that.”

In Europe, she not only works with the Danish Radio Big Band, she is also a permanent guest conductor of Holland’s Metropole Orkest, in Amsterdam. Those gigs have forced her to more fully digest traditional big band writing and integrate it into her Third Stream concept, an accomplishment on vivid display with her terrific new album Imaginary Visions (Edition Records) with the Danish Radio Big Band.

“The DR Big Band has an amazing library, so we actually play a lot of Thad [Jones] and Bob [Brookmeyer],” she said. “And playing that, my sound range is changing a little bit from symphonic to … well, a Jim McNeely sound, or Thad Jones sound.” DB