Itaru Oki

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Itaru Oki at the St. Ingbert Jazz Festival (1988)

Itaru Oki ( Japanese 沖 至 , Oki Itaru ; born September 10, 1941 in Suma-ku , Kobe , Hyōgo Prefecture ; † August 25, 2020 in Paris ) was a Japanese jazz trumpeter and cornet player . He belonged to the first generation of free jazz in Japan .

Live and act

Oki came from a musical family; his father played shakuhachi and his mother was a koto master. After starting out in classical music, he switched to trumpet in high school when he was fourteen. He first played in the brass band of his school before he became a student of Fumio Nanri , an important jazz musician in Japan. As an architecture student , he was a member of a Dixieland band in 1959 . In 1964 he became interested in modern jazz and participated in a workshop by Kenny Dorham in Osaka ; the following year he moved to Tokyo, where he took courses from Sadao Watanabe .

Oki became a professional jazz musician and played in various Japanese bands. In 1969 he came to Europe for the first time as a member of the Kanno Group , where he performed at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival . Then he was a member of Masahiko Togashi's ESSG band . In 1974 he settled in France, first in Paris and later in Lyon . From there he toured frequently with the group Message from Japan . In 1977 he performed with Noah Howard's quartet in Berlin (live album Schizophrenic Blues ) and founded a trio with Michel Pilz and Buschi Niebergall . He also played with Alan Silva , Noel McGhie , François Cotinaud , Tchangodei / Kent Carter , Sunny Murray and Claudine François and led his own groups. In Germany, Itaru has performed with the dancer Tadashi Endo and the pianist Masahiko Satō as well as in a quartet with Michel Pilz, Christian Ramond and Klaus Kugel .

Discographic notes

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eyal Haruveni, Itaru Oki (沖 至,) (1941-2020) RIP , freejazzblog.org, August 26, 2020
  2. ↑ Obituary (Asahi Shimbun)
personal data
SURNAME Oki, Itaru
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 沖 至 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese jazz trumpeter and cornet player
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Suma-ku , Kobe , Hyogo Prefecture
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 2020
Place of death Paris