Jazz Articles about Miles Okazaki

About Miles Okazaki

Album Review

Guitarist Miles Okazaki (Steve Coleman, Dan Weiss) is a meticulous artist and visionary partly due to his thorny and geometrically inclined theme-building practices. With ECM recording artist Craig Taborn sharing the frontline, the guitarist often makes complex storylines sound effortless by design, paralleled by the quartet's symmetrical pulses and deterministic gait. The band also gels to odd-metered bump and grind motifs and linear progressions amid succinctly stated unison lines. According to Okazaki, “The Calendar" ..." is a song ...

Interview

Miles Okazaki: Cleaning the Mirror

by Daniel Lehner
August 28, 2012

In the backyard of his home in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, guitarist Miles Okazaki has spent time constructing a multifaceted backyard/garden filled with overhanging plants, stone walkways and a wooden pavilion surrounding a table and benches. The slats of the pavilion's floor seem to have been crafted merely for aesthetic purposes, but there's another process at work: the proportions of the ground structure are 144 in. x 89 in., which are, respectively, the 12th and 13th integer of the Fibonacci sequence ...

Album Review

Miles Okazaki: Figurations

Read "Figurations" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
May 29, 2012

Guitarist Miles Okazaki's Figurations is a fascinating document of how musical invention takes place on the spur of the moment. It is not a mad conglomeration of notes that come out in jagged clusters, but a mellifluous harmolodic excursion by four spectacular musicians as they begin to create music on each of their instruments, with their own ideas flowing organically, yet directed by the composer, Okazaki, who defines how the melody should sound by stating its antecedents and basic idea. ...

Album Review

Miles Okazaki: Figurations

Read "Figurations" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
May 1, 2012

Figurations is the final release in Miles Okazaki's three volume compositional cycle. Its trajectory is based on forward-thinking ideas Okazaki began on his self-produced 2006 debut Mirror, and continued on the nearly sixty-minute Generations (Sunnyside, 2009), which was recorded in the studio in one take. While no less demanding, this recording was commissioned and performed in front of a live and appreciative audience at New York's Jazz Gallery.Methodical yet emotive, there are manifold ideas and theories swirling in ...

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Album Review

Miles Okazaki: Generations

Read "Generations" reviewed by Wilbur MacKenzie

by Wilbur MacKenzie
February 8, 2010

Generations, Miles Okazaki's second CD, displays the ornate structural latticework and solid foundation of a highly skilled conceptual architect. As a guitarist his tone is taut and balanced across the full range of the instrument, full of rhythmic and melodic nuance. Okazaki also shows thoughtfulness and creativity as a composer and bandleader, assembling a close-knit group of skilled colleagues and providing a conceptual and thematic framework that elicits exquisite contributions from all the players. This music resides at the crossroads ...

Album Review

Miles Okazaki: Generations

Read "Generations" reviewed by AAJ Italy Staff

by AAJ Italy Staff
June 16, 2009

Squadra che vince non si cambia, o quasi. Miles Okazaki - chitarrista americano, classe '74, proveniente da una famiglia dedita alle arti visive - dopo il convincente debutto da leader intitolato Mirror dà alle stampe Generations, registrato in un'unica take e ideale prosecuzione del suo discorso compositivo che unisce tecnica, fantasia e intraprendenza. Via gli elementi elettronici e stesso ensemble del lavoro precedente: retroguardia ritmica di livello assoluto composta da Jon Flaugher e Dan Weiss, splendido tridente offensivo con gli ...

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Album Review

Miles Okazaki: Generations

Read "Generations" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
April 12, 2009

Myriad ideas collide and interact on Miles Okazaki's follow-up to Mirror: his latest offering, Generations. These ideas span not only musical forms and concepts but also cultures--from Indian to European and American. The music also leaps across various artistic disciplines--philosophical, mathematical and visual--to render one central ostensible idea: that all sound is an experience shaped by the tangible and intangible in both an infinite and finite measure of time and space. Generations is a series of songs ...