kpjazz ensemble Jazz Band from Ashland, MA

Jazz vocalist Kaoruko Pilkington takes a playful, adventurous approach to the music she's been singing for many years in the Greater Boston area. As an arranger, she loves to apply surprising twists to songs you've heard before, dust off less familiar entries in the Great American Songbook, and put her own jazzy spin on pop classics. As a bandleader, she taps some of the city's best musicians to join her on exciting musical excursions, in clubs and concerts as well as on recordings. She grew up immersed in the sounds of American pop, and in college she studied jazz and listened to favorite singers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Al Jarreau, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, and Aretha Franklin and others. She spent more than ten years playing and singing jazz, pop, R&B, and rock in Tokyo nightclubs, until her deep love for American music eventually brought her to Boston's Berklee College of Music. There she focused on vocal performance and jazz composition, Upon graduating in 1996, Kaoruko quickly hit the circuit of restaurants and clubs in Boston and the surrounding area. She has performed with her kaorukojazz ensemble and in smaller configurations at such venues as Ryles and the Lilypad in Cambridge, the Acton Jazz Café, and radio station WICN in Worcester. She is also one of the hosts for a long-standing Tuesday night jam session at Framingham's Amazing Things Arts Center. Kaoruko's first recording, the self-produced Joy Spring, set the tone for her repertoire with reimagined standards, scatting and wordless vocalizing, and forays into Brazilian music. In addition to Mauro Rongordo on guitar and Thomas Hebb on bass, it also features longtime bandmates and Boston musical aces Mark Shilansky on piano, Bob Tamagni on drums, and Greg Hopkins on trumpet and flugelhorn, who reappear (along with bassist Keala Kaumeheiwa, saxophonist Rick DeMuzio, trombonist Bob Pilkington, pianist Doug Johnson, and drummer Casey Scheurell) on her 2014 release, Bright Side of My Life. Of this outing George W. Harris wrote in Jazz Weekly, "Most impressive here is her flowing, wordless treatment of Pat Metheny's 'Bright Size Life' and a dreamy take of Jimmy Webb's 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix.' . . . Tasty and delicate." Her horn-like improvisations honor the original melodies of songs while exploring the jazz idioms and vocabulary ingrained in her through her intensive studies with Hal Crook.