Jazz: Yoko Miwa Trio

The Yoko Miwa Trio returns to the Poli Club with Special Guest Vocalist Mikayla Shirley.
 

Internationally acclaimed pianist/composer Yoko Miwa is one of the most powerful and compelling performers on the scene today. Her trio, with its remarkable telepathy and infectious energy, has brought audiences to their feet worldwide. Yoko was named a Rising Star Pianist in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 DownBeat Critics Poll. The Yoko Miwa Trio’s 2021 release Songs of Joy received wide acclaim and reached #1 on national jazz radio charts and was voted a best jazz album of 2021 in the DownBeat 86th Annual Readers Poll.

For more than a decade Miwa’s trio has played regularly at major jazz clubs in their home city of Boston, as well as venues around the world. Yoko has performed and/or recorded with a wide range of jazz greats including Sheila Jordan, Slide Hampton, Arturo Sandoval, Esperanza Spalding, and Terri Lyne Carrington.

Miwa’s story of becoming a jazz musician is full of serendipity and happy twists of fate. In the late 1990s the classically-trained artist auditioned for Berklee College of Music on a lark and ended up winning a full scholarship. She arrived at the school from her homeland of Japan in 1997, intending to stay for a year. In 2022, she’s still in Boston, enriching the city’s musical life and serving as one of the most popular professors in the Berklee piano department.