JUNKO YAGAMI: Pop Meets Jazz on Route 66

What happens when Japans City Pop meets New York jazz? Nobody knows.

Thats exactly the point. This isnt a tribute show.

This isnt nostalgia. This is a live experiment four world-class musicians walking into Birdland Theater with decades of Japanese pop and American jazz in their bones, and no predetermined destination.

The songs will be familiar. What happens to them wont be.

Junko Yagamis catalog has already proven it can travel. Songs like Bay City, crafted in the late 1970s with American grooves and independent female spirit baked into every bar, have accumulated billions of streams worldwide not through marketing, but through pure musical gravity.

Listeners in Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, South Korea, and across the United States discovered them on their own and couldnt stop playing 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 one of New Yorks most electrifying percussionists: a founding member of Snarky Puppy, a collaborator of Fred Hersch, Patricia Barber, Donny McCaslin, and Patti Austin, and a player whose 2023 debut album,

Identity

, drew raves from Modern Drummer, DownBeat, and JazzTimes. His drumming is 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 most celebrated Japanese compositions, all newly arranged and reimagined for this night.

Route 66 is the organizing metaphor: a road that carried American music blues, jazz, folk, soul westward across a continent, absorbing everything in its path and transforming it into something new. WHO IS JUNKO YAGAMI?

The short answer: Japans most globally significant female vocalist of the past half century. The longer answer begins in Nagoya, with a teenager who barely listened to Japanese music who transcribed incomprehensible English lyrics into phonetic c