B i o g r a p h y

Takumi Kakimoto is an award-winning pianist and composer, and is a Yamaha Music Scholar supported by the Yamaha Music Foundation.

​

He was born in Himeji, Japan and started to play the piano at the age of six. He studied at the Yamaha Music School and began learning jazz by himself when he was around fifteen. Later on, he studied with jazz pianist Minoru Ozone.  In 2014, he was awarded a full-tuition scholarship from Berklee College of Music in Boston, the U.S. and entered the college in the fall. He dual majored in Jazz Composition and Performance and received a number of awards from the college. He has studied with Ayn Inserto, Tiger Okoshi, Jeff Covell, Rick DiMuzio, Alla Elana Cohen, among others, focusing on learning performance and compositions in Jazz and Classical.

​​

He has performed and presented his original compositions at various venues such as the Provincetown Jazz Festival, Jozenji Street Jazz Festival, Museum of Fine Arts, and Berklee Performance Center. He performed as the first Japanese pianist at the Provincetown Jazz Festival in 2017 and did the opening performance for Molly Ringwald. In the same year, he joined the concert tour with the Contemporary Institute Joint Jazz Ensemble created by Berklee and Shanghai Conservatory of Music as a representative pianist from Berklee and traveled in China for performance. In 2018, his composition Find Phrygiayn was selected to be performed by the U.S. Army band Airmen of Note in the 2018 JEN Young Composer Showcase at the Ninth Annual Jazz Education Network Conference in Dallas, TX. He is a winner in the 2019 and 2020 ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards and received Honorable Mention in 2018. 

​​

Currently, besides his own performance and composition activities, he also works as a pianist at the Boston Ballet, Boston Conservatory at Berklee and churches around Boston.