By Jason Roeder
Berklee.edu Correspondent
October 2002

	Photo by Kim Grant
	Hiromi's Audio • "Tom and Jerry Show" (H. Uehara) Listen: slow | fast

Hiromi Uehara's childhood piano teacher was teaching her student classical music but was also a jazzer at heart. She played Oscar Peterson vinyls for her talented six-year-old pupil, and having whetted her appetite for jazz, planted a small suggestion in her head: "Why don't you improvise a bit?" The now 23-year-old Uehara, winner of one of the college's most prestigious awards, has lived by those words ever since.

"I always tried to play something improvisational," says Uehara, a Jazz Composition/Contemporary Writing and Production dual major from Shizuoka, Japan. "I was playing classical music with swing and voicings. I did it with Mozart and Beethoven. All my compositions from the age of six were not just classical music. It was contemporary classical, mixed with jazz."

When she was 12—an age at which many people are signing up for their very first music lessons—Uehara was exploring the stride piano of Art Tatum and others. When she was 15, she added another musical style to her increasingly eclectic compositional palette.

"I was getting into rock music more and more," Uehara says. "Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Green Day, Santana, Janis Joplin—I played it all."

Still in her teens, Uehara emerged as one of the stars of the Yamaha Music Education System, performing with the likes of Chick Corea and Toshiko Akiyoshi '57. There's nothing she likes more, in fact, than bringing her music to an audience.

"I've always loved performing," Uehara says. "I never get nervous. In recitals, I was always so happy...the best thing in music is communicating with people. It's all about transmitting energy. I can give them energy, and they can give it back to me."

Is it any wonder then that Uehara uses the original Woodstock festival as her model for the ultimate performance experience?

"Did you see how many people were there?" Uehara says. "Just watching it was the highest energy I've ever felt. No show has been the same. They were never able to do it again."

Photo by Justin A. Knight

Uehara spent two years in Tokyo studying law, and though she hadn't put music aside—she continued her recitals and began jingle writing—she realized that music had to be a full-time occupation. A few years earlier, as part of a Yamaha tour of the United States, Uehara had visited Dallas, New York City, and Boston, and had a chance to tour Berklee. When she was ready for the next stage in her music career, she knew the country and the school in which it would begin.

"I always wanted to come to the states," Uehara says. "There are so many people here who want to achieve dreams. The level of musicians is so high, and jazz originated here. I really wanted to feel it. And at Berklee, there are so many musicians, so much musicality, including teachers and students. For me, the most important thing was meeting people."

And she met lots of them—beboppers, heavy metal shredders, classically trained composers searching for new musical directions—and listened to them.

"I always could find amazing players in all kinds of music," Uehara says. "Everyone has a favorite artist, and everyone tried to persuade me that their person was the best. They'd say I had to listen to this person, so I did."

Uehara says she has integrated so many of these influences into her own repertoire, that her compositions, unconventional from the beginning, now defy classification.

"I don't know what my music is called now," she says.

Still, in some ways Uehara is still the precocious little girl whose adventures in music began with an Oscar Peterson record. Uehara, in fact, had been sending the piano great demo tapes for years, and not long ago, her hero invited her to visit him in Toronto.

"I'll fly out tomorrow," she said.

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