Hiromi Travels The World On 88 Keys

New York (Top40 Charts/ Shore Fire Media) - "I really wanted the record to be a kind of travel journal," says Hiromi. On her first solo piano album, Place To Be (Jan 26/Telarc International), the pianist-composer chronicles her journeys from New York City to Sicily, Bern to Boston, Vegas to Germany. To hear portions of the songs from the album and watch a video of Hiromi sharing stories about the locations that inspired Place To Be click here: https://www.concordmusicgroup.com/newmedia/ecards/hiromi/index.html

The set gets under way with the frenetic energy of "BQE." The song captures the intensity of what Hiromi describes in her liner notes as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway's "crazy traffic" but she adds that the attentive motorist can still catch the essence of Manhattan, "a place where reality and dreams exist together."

Her take on "Pachelbel's Canon" came about after Hiromi fulfilled a longstanding dream to walk the streets of Germany while listening to the original composition from the late 1600s. "It came true," she says, "and it was one of those moments so hard to describe in words."

Place To Be caps an unprecedented run of releases for Hiromi. In 2009 alone she released two live DVDs as a leader, accompanied her mentor Chick Corea on the live double album Duet, and joined Stanley Clarke on his latest studio effort Jazz in the Garden. In recent years Hiromi has played festivals the world over including Glastonbury, Fuji Rock, Playboy Jazz and this summer the Toronto Jazz Festival where the Globe and Mail said she "left the audience slack-jawed in amazement."