Migiwa "Miggy" Miyajima - LYDIALIEBMAN.COM

The Sax Project 1 Featuring Dick Oatts
Release Date: November 13, 2026
Label: SoundSpore Records

The Sax Project 1 Featuring Dick Oatts is the new album by New York–based composer, pianist and producer Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima. Miyajima worked for more than a decade with Dick Oatts, a longtime soprano and lead alto saxophonist and musical director with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Oatts joined the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra in 1977; after Jones left the following year, the band continued as the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, then became the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra after Lewis’ death in 1990. After years of working together, Miyajima finally asked Oatts to record her music.

Steve Wilson, Naomu Soeda, Andrew Gould, Ron Blake, Quinsin Nachoff, Carl Maraghi and vocalist KOTETSU complete the personnel. The album contains seven original compositions and three improvisations in six configurations ranging from duo to septet. Miyajima composed and arranged all seven written pieces. Oatts appears on four compositions, plus all three CD- and Bandcamp-exclusive bonus tracks. Three of those four compositions were recorded in July 2025, after he had publicly announced his retirement that January.

Miyajima left a career as a magazine editor-in-chief in Japan to become a full-time musician at 30. Her production work has earned multiple Grammy nominations, including two as associate producer of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra’s Forever Lasting — Live in Tokyo and OverTime: Music of Bob Brookmeyer. She leads the 17-piece Miggy Augmented Orchestra and acoustic quartet KYMN. She has conducted for NEA Jazz Master Slide Hampton and served as one of five producers of the 2025 Celebrating Jim McNeely concert; her honors include a 2024 MacDowell Fellowship.

“Music is something to experience — to live in,” Miyajima says. “Having witnessed so much death, I don’t see music as merely something to listen to. Who I perform with, what we perform and how we perform matter deeply to me. To me, the work of a composer and producer is sacred.”

Miyajima’s history with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra began in 2008, when she traveled to New York for the band’s anniversary week and attended every performance, sitting near the saxophone section and taking notes on its voicings and arrangements. The following year, she began producing the orchestra’s Japan tours and educational programs. That work ultimately encompassed eight tours and introduced her to Oatts and Wilson.

After surviving the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, Miyajima moved to the United States in 2012 with support from the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. She joined the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop that year and studied there with Jim McNeely and Mike Holober through 2015. Miyajima continued working with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra through 2016. Two years later, the Miggy Augmented Orchestra released its ArtistShare debut, Colorful.

The Sax Project began in 2020, when the pandemic erased Miyajima’s overseas tours and television appearances following Colorful. Soeda asked her to arrange the piano piece “Exploring Discovering” for saxophone quartet. He heard Miyajima’s classical piano background in her jazz phrasing and harmonies and urged her to keep writing for saxophones. She began developing music for jazz and classical players from Japan and North America, expanding the instrumentation to include voice and piano. “The idea behind it was to bring the world closer together,” Miyajima writes.

At the same time, Miyajima was developing Unbreakable Hope & Resilience, an umbrella project based on 20 true stories from the aftermath of the 2011 disaster. Its first release was the 2021 book and accompanying music Your Future Story. The second, Unbreakable Hope & Resilience, arrived June 26, 2026, a live recording from Dizzy’s Club featuring Miyajima conducting a 17-piece big band with three actors. The interviews behind the project strengthened her determination to live without regrets. One result was a decision she had postponed for years: asking Oatts, whom she considered family, to play her music. “Perhaps because we were so close,” she writes in the album notes, “I had always held back.”

The 2023 Sax Project sessions were made possible in part with support from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation. Miyajima recorded at Sear Sound with Wilson, Soeda, Nachoff, Maraghi, KOTETSU, Blake and Oatts. Oatts initially declined, saying he was too busy. Months later, he heard Miyajima’s demos and changed his mind. “I’ve been keeping myself too busy lately, but this reminded me why I came to New York,” he told her. “Thank you for reminding me.” His response brought Miyajima to tears.

A 2025 Chamber Music America Artistic Projects grant, funded by the Howard Gilman Foundation, partially supported a second round of recording. Oatts had announced his retirement that January. With help from him and his family, Miyajima recorded with him again at Samurai Hotel Studio in Astoria on July 10. She also invited Gould, an alto saxophonist who deeply admired Oatts. Because Gould often worked as Oatts’ substitute, the two rarely had the chance to play together. Miyajima wanted to give Gould that chance. Jay Messina recorded, mixed and mastered both rounds of sessions.

Miyajima writes her composed pieces for specific musicians; every written part bears the player’s name. “I write for each person,” she says. “That’s very Ellingtonian, and it’s something I inherited from Jim McNeely.” The three Haikus work differently. For “Haiku A,” “Haiku B” and “Haiku C,” KOTETSU and Nachoff are the featured improvisers in a quintet with Wilson, Soeda and Maraghi. Miyajima supplied no written music. Instead, she cued changes in mood, intensity and direction as the quintet improvised. She planned to keep one performance; all three made the album.

“Will You Be My Friend?” comes from Miyajima’s unfinished Forgiveness suite and depicts two central characters meeting and hoping to become friends. She first wrote the piece for piano. While arranging it for saxophones, she remembered the excitement of meeting Oatts and Wilson after years of hearing them on big-band records. Wilson solos on alto and Oatts on soprano; Miyajima plays piano alongside Blake, Nachoff and Maraghi.

On lead single “Superstar Overloaded,” Oatts and Gould improvise simultaneously over a percussive saxophone groove. At Melting Cups, a Sunnyside café, a groove caught Miyajima’s ear and she began singing it to herself. She passed the figure across the saxophones, left Oatts and Gould room to improvise over it and added her own vocal percussion. “We all have to be a drummer,” she says. “On paper, it’s not difficult. But when you play it, you have to really groove.”

Miyajima wrote “My Yellow Blues” in response to racism she has experienced as an Asian woman in the United States. During the pandemic, strangers shouted racist abuse at her and physically harassed her in public. She also recalls seeing disbelief when mentors introduced her as a producer, conductor or bandleader. Miyajima chose Wilson, a cherished older-brother figure in her life, and Japanese saxophonist Soeda for the alto-and-soprano duet. “The piece is my outcry against the racism I have repeatedly experienced as an Asian woman,” she writes.

Miyajima had performed “If I Could See Thad” as a combo piece for more than 20 years before arranging it for saxophone quartet. She never met Thad Jones, but musicians who had worked with him repeatedly told her they wished the two could have known one another. “It’s like a grandpa who passed away before you were born,” she says. Oatts’ history with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra gives the recording a direct connection to Jones. For this version, Oatts brought an old soprano saxophone without a strap because he believed its sound fit the piece. Three rehearsal takes appear as CD- and Bandcamp-exclusive bonus tracks, preserving three additional Oatts solos.

Miyajima wrote “Your Light Pours Through Every Gap” specifically for the 2025 session. Oatts plays alto. She wrote the score to give each of the other musicians a brief, intimate stretch of unison time with him, one at a time. “I learned from this recording session that, as a composer, what I can give to the players is time shared together,” Miyajima says. “When you play unison, you need to really be together with that person. I wanted to give all of them this moment.” Oatts kept sending her messages about the melody after the session: “That ballad is wonderful.” “I still catch myself humming it.”

String quartet ETHEL commissioned “The Blooming Season” for itself and flutist Allison Loggins-Hull. The piece depicts spring, when new life emerges. For the Sax Project version, Miyajima adjusted the phrasing for saxophones and gave KOTETSU the vocal feature. She hopes the recording will introduce the Japanese vocalist to more listeners in the United States. When Miyajima played KOTETSU’s work for Rufus Reid and Billy Childs, both asked the same question: “Who is this?”

Miyajima wrote “Sunset Embrace” for Blake. She experiences synesthesia; particular notes in his tenor saxophone appear to her as orange and yellow. Watching a sunset over the Hudson River, she recognized those same colors in his sound. When she told Blake, she learned that his late mother had taken up photographing sunsets in her later years, creating collages from the photographs and framing them for the house. Miyajima plays piano on the sextet performance; Blake takes the tenor solo.

“I truly believe there are two kinds of music,” Miyajima says. “One sounds cool. Another shakes your heart. I think the difference comes when a group of people in a recording session respect each other and love each other. I’ve seen it in every recording session I’ve attended, and I think that miracle happened here. I want listeners to catch that.”

Unbreakable Hope & Resilience
Release Date: June 26, 2026
Label: SoundSpore Records

Unbreakable Hope & Resilience, the latest album from composer, pianist, and six-time Grammy-nominated producer Migiwa "Miggy" Miyajima and her Miggy Augmented Orchestra was Recorded live at Dizzy's Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 17, 2025, the album is a 72-minute documentary-style big band suite drawn from Miyajima's personal interviews with twenty survivors and volunteers of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (commonly referred to as 3.11). The ensemble features a 17-piece big band alongside actors Megan Masako Haley, Ashton Muñiz, and Arielle Gonzalez, who voice the interviewees throughout the performance.

Miyajima is herself a survivor of 3.11. The year after the disaster, she arrived in New York City on a Japanese government scholarship, torn between gratitude for the opportunity and guilt over those still suffering at home. That guilt became a question: if she, someone who had not lost her home or family to the waves, felt this shattered, how were those who had experienced it directly managing to carry on? Beginning in 2019, she set out to find answers, interviewing twenty individuals: a pastor whose church stood barely five kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, a mother and son from Ishinomaki who lost their family to the tsunami, volunteers who relocated to devastated communities, and a cancer survivor. None of them were larger-than-life heroes. They cried. They struggled. And yet, somehow, they took another step. It is their raw, unvarnished humanity that forms the heart of this album.

The suite unfolds across nine jazz movements and four narrations. The album opens with "Intro 1 (2:46 p.m.)," in which backstage chatter between band members conjures the ordinariness of life before disaster, before Ryan Keberle's trombone breaks in as a wailing siren capturing the chaos of the moment the earthquake struck. "Where Is My Home?" tells the story of Pastor Akira Sato, whose church stood barely five kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi. He lost his home and all his possessions and spent more than a year moving between evacuation shelters while holding his congregation together, before a new church, funded by donations from around the world, rose in a different town. Sam Dillon's driving tenor saxophone and fast-swing rhythm convey the upheaval, before a settling chord announces new hope. "I Live, I Talk" centers on Kyohmi Takahashi, who lost both parents to the tsunami in Ishinomaki and was drawn back into daily life by the hands extended by those around her, with Quinsin Nachoff's tenor saxophone solo mirroring that process of response and recovery.

"Let Me Talk About My Dream" follows Kazemaru Chiba, Kyohmi's son, who at 18 lost his grandparents in the disaster and stood by his mother through years of depression, and now works toward building a society where people genuinely support one another. An 18-bar melody modulates repeatedly into a rich ensemble texture that reflects the shape of his journey. Movements five and six tell Miyajima's own story: her arrival in New York, the collision of joy and guilt, and the friend whose words persuaded her to take the next step, rendered in an intimate piano and trombone duet with Jason Jackson, the only track on which Miyajima performs at the piano. "I Will Make a Change" follows engineer Takayuki Yoshinaga, who left Tokyo to join a community rebuilding project in Namie, Fukushima, a town that had been evacuated in its entirety, expressed as a blues featuring Carl Maraghi's baritone saxophone.

"The Future of the Planted Seeds" tells the story of A.K. Akemi Kakihara and Together for 311, thirteen Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in New York who sustained memorial events for a decade and found, in doing so, a second family. In the introduction, Miyajima steps back from conductor and composer to survivor, reading aloud the names of each of the group's thirteen members — one horn player sounding a note for each name, until all thirteen voices join in harmony. Ben Kono's flute then traces that bond with quiet certainty. "Life Is Good" is one of the album's most exuberant tracks, inspired by Miyajima's mother Yuko, who survived both the earthquake and a subsequent cancer diagnosis and emerged with the resolve to put everything she had learned to use for others. The full band breaks into handclaps as the ensemble's collective joy spills over. "10 Years and Counting" layers a melody from one to ten, growing richer in harmony and texture with each pass, as Miyajima looks back across a decade of survival and creation. The album closes with "Fourteen Springs," a quiet and unshakeable declaration carried by Megan Masako Haley's voice and Rachel Therrien's trumpet: that Miyajima will live fully for those whose lives were cut short.

Works-in-progress from the suite were performed in New York, Texas, Florida, Portland, Australia, France, and Japan before the world premiere at Dizzy's Club in March 2025. Each time, audiences wept. "Knowing that so many people pushed through after the earthquake gave me strength," one listener shared. "My family went through cancer too." Whatever the country, whatever the background, the drive to keep walking through pain proved to be something audiences everywhere could feel. On the night of the world premiere, as the final notes faded, the crowd sat in stunned silence before erupting in applause, many wiping tears from their eyes.

As 2026 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Miyajima has chosen this moment to release the album globally. "This project began as a way to work through my own pain," she reflects. "But what I was left with in the end was a sense of wonder, at how remarkable human beings truly are, and how beautiful and precious it is to keep fighting to live. In a time of war, displacement, and extreme inequality, I kept asking myself how to live with integrity through all of it. This album is the answer I found."

For the past seven years, Miyajima's work on this project has been supported by the Jerome Foundation's "Jerome Hill Fellowship," the MAP Fund's SPA Coaching, the Asian American Arts Alliance's residency, and the Woodward Residency, while production was partially funded by the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, administered by the New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts. LMCC Creative Engagement and Culture Lab LIC provided opportunities for the work-in-progress concert and the world premiere.