Markio Mishiro organized a two-day klezmer workshop in Tokyo with Christina, who was there to present at the Music Encoding Conference. Seven students joined Christina for a deep dive into klezmer genre and style through the KMDMP corpus. We sang and played and danced together and then went out for a wonderful Chanko Samurai hot pot dinner in the heart of Shinjuku district. All of the participants brought both deep focus and incredible sensitivity to interpreting the tunes we learned. It was wonderful to spend some time with the small but mighty klezmer community in the Tokyo region, including experienced klezmorim Mariko Mishiro, Matsumoto Misako, and Naoki Hishinuma, and to welcome relative newcomers Jennnifer May, Yukiko Nakamura, Emy Sakai, and Tamaoki Fumihiro. 

The day after the official workshop, four of us did some private accordion lessons together. I learned that when you need a place to make some noise with your accordion when all the practice rooms are booked, you go to a Karaoke bar!  

We all had so much fun in the workshop that ethnomusicologist and violinist Emy Sakai organized an impromptu lecture and concert at Tokyo University of Arts the following week. In classic KMDMP residency style, workshop participants joined in to perform some of the tunes we learned, and we were able to feature Naoki on trumpet and Emy on violin. Mariko led the entire room in an exuberant dance set to close out the show.  

Perhaps one of the most meaningful moments was meeting professor Yukio Uemura, who was Mariko’s supervisor for her masters thesis. He wrote the research request letter for Mariko that Anna Rogers took with her to Kyiv in the summer of 2017. It was an extraordinary privilege to meet another link in the chain that instigated KMDMP, and to share music from the corpus with students and faculty in the place where the journey began.

Mariko and I will be collaborating in the next few months to create a translation of the KMDMP project pages into Japanese!