B i o g r a p h y

Takumi Kakimoto is an award-winning pianist, composer and accompanist, and is a Yamaha Music Scholar supported by 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, Jeff Covell, Rick DiMuzio, Alla Elana Cohen, among others, focusing on learning performance and compositions in Jazz and Classical.

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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. 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 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. 

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