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BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:9bc575fb-9935-4561-8625-7702153de92a@360exp.net
SEQUENCE:29791981
DTSTAMP:20260918T002435Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260823T210104Z
DTSTART:20261116T000000Z
DTEND:20261116T011500Z
SUMMARY:JUNKO YAGAMI: Pop Meets Jazz on Route 66
LOCATION:Birdland Theater
DESCRIPTION:What happens when Japans City Pop meets New York jazz? Nobody k
 nows. Thats exactly the point. This isnt a tribute show. This isnt nostalg
 ia. This is a live experiment four world-class musicians walking into Bird
 land Theater with decades of Japanese pop and American jazz in their bones
 \, and no predetermined destination. The songs will be familiar. What happ
 ens to them wont be. Junko Yagamis catalog has already proven it can trave
 l. Songs like Bay City\, crafted in the late 1970s with American grooves a
 nd independent female spirit baked into every bar\, have accumulated billi
 ons of streams worldwide not through marketing\, but through pure musical 
 gravity. Listeners in Brazil\, Indonesia\, Germany\, South Korea\, and acr
 oss the United States discovered them on their own and couldnt stop playin
 g them. The City Pop phenomenon is real\, it is massive\, and Yagami is at
  its center. Ross Pederson bandmaster and drummer for this engagement is o
 ne of New Yorks most electrifying percussionists: a founding member of Sna
 rky Puppy\, a collaborator of Fred Hersch\, Patricia Barber\, Donny McCasl
 in\, and Patti Austin\, and a player whose 2023 debut album\, *Identity*\,
  drew raves from Modern Drummer\, DownBeat\, and JazzTimes. His drumming i
 s explosive\, nuanced\, and relentlessly alive. What he does with a groove
  is not decoration it is transformation. The program moves through beloved
  American standards tied to the mythology of Route 66 alongside Yagamis mo
 st celebrated Japanese compositions\, all newly arranged and reimagined fo
 r this night. Route 66 is the organizing metaphor: a road that carried Ame
 rican music blues\, jazz\, folk\, soul westward across a continent\, absor
 bing everything in its path and transforming it into something new. WHO IS
  JUNKO YAGAMI? The short answer: Japans most globally significant female v
 ocalist of the past half century. The longer answer begins in Nagoya\, wit
 h a teenager who barely listened to Japanese music who transcribed incompr
 ehensible English lyrics into phonetic characters just to sing along with 
 Barbra Streisand and The Carpenters\, who fell in love with the image of W
 estern women who stood strong and never apologized for it. That sensibilit
 y never left her music. A massive commercial breakthrough came early. A de
 cade of industry pressure followed. Then came liberation a move to Los Ang
 eles\, a long pause\, a return to Japan galvanized by the 2011 earthquake 
 and volunteer work in the disaster zones of Tohoku. Things I couldnt do fo
 r myself\, I could do for others. She rebuilt her career entirely on her o
 wn terms: self-produced\, self-managed\, answering to no one but her audie
 nce. In 2022 she became the first Japanese artist inducted into the Women 
 Songwriters Hall of Fame in the United States not through lobbying\, but b
 ecause Hall judges found her on YouTube and heard what she had always been
 . Her voice carries all of it: the discipline of a professional who surviv
 ed the industry\, the freedom of an artist who escaped it\, and the depth 
 of someone who has spent fifty years singing because she genuinely cannot 
 do otherwise.\n\nBoletos: https://www.ticketweb.com/event/junko-yagami-pop
 -meets-jazz-birdland-theater-tickets/14214934
URL;VALUE=URI:https://360exp.net/events/9bc575fb-9935-4561-8625-7702153de92
 a
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
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