Tatsu Aoki Archives - Chicago Reader

Recommendations for the year’s final Bandcamp Friday

by Leor Galil November 29, 2022November 29, 2022

The final Bandcamp Friday of the year arrives December 2. I’ve made a habit of rounding up music recommendations from recent Reader stories for each Bandcamp Friday, and since this is the 26th one, I hope it’s redundant to explain that for a 24-hour period, Bandcamp passes along its usual share of sales revenue to […]

A collage of Da Wei Wang holding an electric guitar and silhouetted by a light behind his head (on the left) and six tiled color-processed images of Tatsu Aoki with a shamisen, mostly in purples, pinks and blues (on the right)

Music

Tatsu Aoki and Da Wei Wang team up for a double album of ecstatic ambience

by J.R. Nelson and Leor Galil November 1, 2022November 1, 2022

For a couple months now, Gossip Wolf has been revisiting Yes Strings Attached, the new duo album from bassist and shamisen player Tatsu Aoki and guitarist Da Wei Wang. Aoki is also a filmmaker, composer, and founder of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival; Wang makes experimental solo music and adds his beguiling stylings to […]

Arts & Culture

Rika Lin’s ‘ingenuity of necessity’ bridges centuries of tradition

by Irene Hsiao April 7, 2021August 18, 2021

Influences from kabuki and karate inform choreographer Rika Lin’s boundary-crossing body of dance work.

Music

The Best of the Miyumi Project celebrates 20 years of Tatsu Aoki’s culture-combining ensemble

by Bill Meyer December 22, 2020August 18, 2021

Tatsu Aoki left his native Tokyo in 1977 to study experimental film and settled in Chicago two years later. In addition to making films, he improvises, composes, and conducts music, playing bass, shamisen, and taiko drums, and by the early 1990s he’d connected with the local jazz scene, developing a particular affinity with past and […]

Music

Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo pays a visit to honor late saxophonist Fred Anderson

by Bill Meyer December 16, 2019August 18, 2021

Twenty-five years ago, Fred Anderson and Toshinori Kondo recorded a live quartet record with drummer Hamid Drake and bassist Tatsu Aoki that’s only now seeing release.

Music

Polymath Tatsu Aoki celebrates his kanreki with a night of bass and drums

by Bill Meyer December 13, 2018August 18, 2021

No matter where you’re from, turning 60 feels significant, but in Japan they have a name for it. Kanreki signifies the start of a new cycle of life with your troubles and responsibilities forgotten. Celebrants often wear red—a color associated with youth—and traditionally they retire from adult household responsibility. Tatsu Aoki, who was born in […]