about

Takahiro's music begins with the foundation of bebop. Playing and recording with Vincent Herring, Cyrus Chestnut, Russell Malone, Carl Allen, and Eric Alexander, he took in the history and style of jazz.

Years of playing gospel in New York's churches followed, and a meeting with Maurice Brown opened the door to the hip-hop world. He learned groove and context on stage with Talib Kweli, Smif-N-Wessun, Black Moon, and Kool Keith — rappers who drove the '90s — and learned how jazz fuses with modern styles, and how an ensemble breathes, playing beside Anderson .Paak, Chris Dave, Keyon Harrold, Isaiah Sharkey, Jermaine Holmes, and MonoNeon, players from the worlds of D'Angelo and Erykah Badu.

He picked up whatever the moment called for: piano, keys, synths, synth bass, programming.

Into the style he built on the bandstand, he brings the history of Japan. That long history holds a deep spirituality and ideas, melodies all its own, and rhythms and dances strikingly close to the folk music of Africa.

He mixes Japan's history into New York's music and ensemble playing, shaping it experiment by experiment on his own projects. Life Is Your Thoughts (2020), on the New York label Ropeadope, set English rap against old Japanese tales inside the same songs. 流 (Ru) (2023), the first album on his own label access art studio, was made with Blaque Dynamite and Maurice Brown. Off Sync (2024), recorded with Chris Dave on drums throughout the album, was built on a single idea: to make a work of literature out of music.

And now he is researching a new genre — YATARA — that replaces the African rhythm at the deepest foundation of New York's music with the rhythms of 1600s Japan, using the clave as a shared key. He is giving it shape on stage, little by little.

He stays in motion across the world's stages — the Blue Note, Java, New Orleans, and Montreal jazz festivals, his own band's tours through China, Taiwan, and Japan, and a night at London's Jazz Re:freshed. He is an Ableton, Sequential, and Hammond artist.

It all points to one idea: to bring world-class music close enough for anyone to reach, and to bring people together through it. That thinking runs through his studio, access art studio, and the music education he runs, Mubo.