After her academic career of music in Kyoto University of Arts, Chiharu Uetsuki began playing lounge piano as her profession. Her main activities are developed in Kyoto, St.Francisco, Belgium, and Tokyo. Now she lives in Tokyo and is playing the longest years among above area.
In 2002, she has been to Tunisia to learn kanun playing skills and makam theory, during her stay in Tunis, she played piano every day at a Hotel lounge.
Charateristics of Her Music
One of the characteristics of her music is wide range of genres. She plays popular piano sometimes brightly or sometimes lightly like Carmen Cavallaro or like Clayderman or George Winston. She also plays Italian canzone, French chansons, Latin music, jazz, and many other genres of music.
In addition to this wide range of music, she has a special ability to perceive what people need in every cases. The sounds created from her fingers and voices is always full of sensitivity and empathy give our heart joy and healing and new energy without fail.
Another characteristics of her music is that she sings accompanying herself on the piano. She sings oper arias, because it was one of her major at the university, but not only canzones and Napolitana which is worth listening but also she sings chansons, popular music, standard jazz, and almost all of genres of songs. She is still adding other genre of music like Turkish music in her repertoires.
But, as far as piano has been played mainly in the western music, it has a limitation of the twelve note scale. Chiharu who are interested in arabic music in these years already began challenging new performances in the arabic makam scales of which variations are almost infinite through playing kanun.
Her first kanun solo CD has been published in Dec.2002.