ABOUT EMI MAKABE (shamisen / voice)

Emi Makabe is a Japanese composer, vocalist, shamisen player, and educator based in New York City. Her songs, described by New York Music Daily as “rapturous, adventurous Japanese folk-influenced jazz,” encompass jazz, pop, classical and improvised music, and also reflect her background in Japanese music. She has performed in renowned venues in New York City, Europe and Japan. She sings in English and Japanese as well as wordlessly, and plays piano and shamisen, a Japanese traditional string instrument.

She was born in Chiba, Japan, and has been involved with music from early childhood. Her mother, who taught music at elementary school, was her first piano teacher. Early musical activities included singing, playing flute, and learning the Japanese koto and shamisen, and as a teenager she began to play and compose original songs.

Moving to New York in 2008, she earned a Bachelor of Music degree in jazz performance and Pro Music award from the City College of New York, and went on to complete a Master of Music from Aaron Copland School of Music while singing in the Billy Harper Voices. Her focus was on jazz and classical harmony, theory and vocal technique, and her teachers include Theo Bleckman, Donna Doyle, Janet Steele, David Schober, Jeb Patton, Billy Harper and Thomas Morgan. Counterpoint is at the heart of her approach to composition, and she is taking ongoing counterpoint lessons with Paul Caputo and Judith Berkson.

She participated in the 2018 Copenhagen Jazz Festival, singing and playing shamisen in a duo performance with Thomas Morgan. She is currently composing and performing her compositions at jazz venues in New York such as the 55 Bar, Cornelia Street Cafe, Rockwood Music Hall, ShapeShifter Lab and St. Peter’s Church, performing with musicians such as Kenny Wollesen, Thomas Morgan, Vitor Gonçalves, Johnathan Blake, Rudy Royston, Nate Wood, Gerald Cleaver, Fabian Almazan, Ches Smith, Chris Tordini, Jacob Sacks, Fung Chern Hwei, Billy Mintz, Satoshi Takeishi and Billy Harper.

She is also a Steinway-associate educator, teaching voice, piano and music theory.

ABOUT THOMAS MORGAN (bass)

Bassist Thomas Morgan began playing the cello at 7, eventually switching to upright-bass at 14. In 2003 he received his bachelor’s degree in Music from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Harvie Swartz and Garry Diall. He has also studied briefly with Ray Brown and Peter Herbert. Morgan has worked with David Binney, Steve Coleman, Joey Baron, Josh Roseman, Brad Shepik, Steve Cardenas, Timuçin Şahin, Kenny Wollesen, Gerald Cleaver, Adam Rogers and Kenny Werner.[1] He has also collaborated with Jakob Bro, Dan Tepfer, Jim Black, John Abercrombie, and Masabumi Kikuchi, and he has performed with the Sylvie Courvoisier-Mark Feldman Quartet.

Morgan was featured prominently on the 2017 ECM album Small Town in a duet setting with guitarist Bill Frisell. The album documents a 2016 live performance at the Village Vanguard.

In 2014, Morgan’s own trio, featuring keyboardist Pete Rende and drummer Dan Weiss, was reviewed in the New York Times by jazz critic Ben Ratliff, who called Morgan, “a jazz musician whose presence in a recording or a performance almost automatically [makes] it worth your time.”

ABOUT VITOR GONÇALVES (pipe organ / piano)

Vitor Gonçalves is a pianist, accordionist, composer and arranger from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After an illustrious career as an in demand musician in Brazil, playing with such icons as Hermeto Pascoal, Maria Bethânia, Itiberê Zwarg, and many others, he made the move to New York City, where he currently resides.

Since arriving here in 2012, he has garnered much acclaim and built a star lighted resumé, including features in NPR’s Jazz Night in America, hosted by Christian McBride and The New York Times as a guest of the renowned Spok Frevo Orquestra. A frequent resident on the stages of Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Jazz Standard, and the Jazz Gallery, he both leads his own projects, and collaborates with figures in the New York scene such as Anat Cohen, Vinícius Cantuária, Anthony Wilson, Cyro Baptista, and Yotam Silberstein.

He also has played in Jazz Festivals and venues around the world, such as Newport Jazz, Jazz à Vienne, Umbria Jazz Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and the Coliseum in Lisbon, Portugal.

Vitor moved to New York in 2012 to deepen his pursuit of Jazz and its connection with Brazilian music, and to explore the diverse musical melting pot that is New York City. It is here that he began leading his own group and forming new collectives, while pursuing a Masters Degree at City College. In 2017 he released his debut album on Sunnyside Records, Vitor Gonçalves Quartet, featuring Dan Weiss (drums), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Todd Neufeld (guitar). The album was reviewed with 4 and half stars at Downbeat jazz magazine.

Other groups he co-leads are “SanfoNYa Brasileira”, an accordion trio with Eduardo Belo on bass and Vanderlei Pereira on drums, and “Regional de NY”, one of the biggest representatives of Choro music (a rich Brazilian genre) in the USA. Both groups released an original album, the former with Steve Wilson as a guest and the latter with Fred Hersch.

He received two nominations for the Grammy Awards 2020, for Best Latin Jazz album with Thalma de Freitas and for Best Large Jazz Ensemble with Anat Cohen Tentet.