About Shigeki Kawahara...I was born in Albany, New York in 1960. One year later, I moved to Japan with my family and had been brought up there. When I was in US in 1960, I was only a small baby. At the time when I came to Japan, I did not speak either English or Japanese (any language) yet. You see, my real mother tongue is Japanese, not English. At the age of three, I started playing the piano. Although I was not a serious apprentice for my piano teacher, I am sure that I really enjoyed playing the piano, music at large, anyway.
In 1972, I bought an album of
Quincy Jones named "Smackwater Jack". I liked TV program "Ironside" at the time. Soundtrack was produced by Quincy Jones. This album turned me to Jazz music. It was really fascinating for me to listen to such rich and jazzy arrangement I had never listened to before. Ever since then, I became a long time big fan of Quincy. I have all his albums. I learned many cool sounds of musical instruments such as Rhodes Electric piano, Mini Moog, Hammond B-3, Solina String Ensemble, and many more.
During my high school age, I joined a brass band where I had experiences in playing trumpets and saxophones. In that brass band, I became more like an arranger/ band leader than a horn player, practicing arrangement of bigband, and learning characteristics of different horn instruments. You can see, I was already a "Quincy-wanna-bee".
In my first 3 years in college (1979-82), I was most active and busy as a keyboard and piano player mostly in live performance. I was playing with a 9-piece jazz/ fusion combo around 50 live sessions per year. At the time, Joe Sample and Herbie Hancock were (sure, they still are) my idle. "
Rhodes Piano" was a main keyboard. Even now, Rhodes sound is a basic ingredient of my sound arrangement.
I bought
YAMAHA CS-20M and learned how to manipulate and play synthsizers (analogue ones with lots of nobs and switches, of
course, there was no digital ones). It was monophonic, really heavy and bulky, but a dream gadget for me to create my own sound waves.
During 1979-1983, I had one regular place to play solo jazz piano. The place was a small cozy bar restaurant in Jiyugaoka, Tokyo. Every Wednesday and Friday night, I played mellow standard jazz tunes there. A grand piano was placed in the very center of the restaurant and it was surrounded by a big bar table. I was playing almost face to face with the audience.
In August 1983, I went back to Albany, New York. I joined Graduate School in
State University of New York at Albany for Master's degree in public economics and policy. Well, this was the period I studied most in my life. Where was Jazz? In Albany, there was an old jazz place called "Gemini Jazz Cafe". Every once in a while, I went there and enjoyed listening to and playing music.
In August 1985, I've got my degree and came back to Japan. In April 1986, started working as an economist for an international consulting organization. This makes me traveling around the world for over 200 days a year. For a while, I managed to play with a local jazz band "EM2" in Yokohama, Japan, for live performance. Later in the middle of 1990's, I became way too busy to be a regular pianist. I had to stop live performance...
Music, however, continues to be my "Another World". Around the corners of Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Rabat (Morocco), and wherever possible, I pop into small bars with the piano and "play it again".
Thanks to up-to-date technology in recording using Macintosh and MOTU Performer, now I can produce recording works of my own tunes with layers of rich sound of arrangement. I have always wanted to be "Quincy". Internet and nice people like
CD Baby made it possible for me to share my feelings of sound all around the world. People from Switzerland, Brazil, Germany, and many other places (I never met them!) had already purchased my CDs. My music have been made available in iTunes Music Store, Amzon, and many other sites as well. Fascinating...isn't it?
