B i o g r a p h y

Takumi Kakimoto is an award-winning pianist/composer, Yamaha Music Scholar selected by the Yamaha Music Foundation.

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He was born in Himeji, Japan and started to play the piano at the age of six. He studied classical piano at Yamaha Music School and later began learning jazz by himself when he was around fifteen. 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 is dual majoring in Jazz Composition and Performance and has been studying with Ayn Inserto, Tiger Okoshi, Rick DiMuzio, Elena Lucas, Alla Cohen, among others, focusing on learning jazz and classical compositions.

 

He has performed and presented his original compositions at various venues such as the Provincetown Jazz Festival, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Berklee Performance Center, David Friend Recital Hall, Lawrence and Alma Berk Recital Hall. He performed as the first Japanese musician 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. Recently, his composition has been selected for performance in the 2018 JEN Young Composer Showcase at the Ninth Annual Jazz Education Network Conference in Dallas, TX. Another composition won the second prize in the 10th Krzysztof Komeda Composers Competition. He has also received an honorable mention in the ASCAP 2018 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards.