Miho Hazama began playing electric keyboard at age three at the Yamaha Music Foundation's school in Tokyo, and by ten she had reached the national final of the Junior Electone Concours. At Kunitachi College of Music, she studied classical composition under Masakazu Natsuda and Kazunori Maruyama, and, while still a student, she composed and arranged for Yōsuke Yamashita, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra, and several other ensembles. In 2010, she moved to New York City to study jazz composition at the Manhattan School of Music, where she worked under Jim McNeely.
Hazama completed her master's in jazz composition in 2012 and built her own ensemble, m_unit, in New York. With m_unit, she released four albums between 2012 and 2023, and the records earned steady recognition: the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, the Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize, Jazz Japan's Rising Star Award, and a 2019 Grammy nomination for Dancer in Nowhere. DownBeat named her one of "25 for the Future." Jazz Times called the ensemble "a classy large ensemble that keeps the listener guessing and enchanted." Alongside the recordings, she composed for orchestras including the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Gothenburg Symphony, and others in Europe and Japan, and began appearing as a guest conductor with European big bands. As she has put it, "in the US, jazz is a heritage to preserve rather than something there's a felt need to reinvent," and following the example of her teachers, she redirected her career toward Europe, where the appetite for new jazz composition remained vibrant.
In 2019, Hazama became chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band, stepping into a position previously held by Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer, and McNeely himself, among others. She has held the role since, extending her contract through 2028, and also serves as permanent guest conductor of the Metropole Orkest and principal guest conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. Her 2025 BBC Proms debut, with the BBC Concert Orchestra, extended her work into the larger symphonic world. Frames, her fourth album on Edition Records and her third with the Danish Radio Big Band, arrives in April 2026 and takes the band's own institutional history as its compositional subject. Hazama built each piece by studying the musical language of seven former chief conductors: Ib Glindemann, Ray Pitts, Palle Mikkelborg, Thad Jones, Ole Kock Hansen, Bob Brookmeyer, and McNeely. She absorbed their idioms into her own writing and composed from there. In her words, the album honors "that history quietly—not as direct tributes, but as a continuation of the orchestra's evolving voice rooted in Copenhagen." McNeely died while Hazama was at work on the record, and the loss runs through it.
Lawrence Peryer recently hosted Miho Hazama on The Tonearm Podcast. The two discussed Hazama's early musical education in Japan, the path from classical composition into jazz studies, what she learned from studying with Jim McNeely, and the compositional thinking behind Frames—including what McNeely's passing brought to the project.
You can listen to the entire conversation in the audio player embedded below. The transcript has been edited for flow, clarity, and length.
Lawrence Peryer: I’m curious about your early start with the Yamaha Music Foundation. What led you to music instruction at such a young age? Was music part of your family and household?
Miho Hazama: My parents are not professional musicians, but they both noticed that baby Miho was dancing wildly to music all the time. They decided to bring me to music school to see how it went. My father worked at an insurance company that required him to move to many different places in Japan, but Yamaha Music School has branches everywhere—it's one of the biggest music education systems in the country. So my parents thought that as long as I was at a Yamaha school, I could just keep learning music wherever we went, which is exactly what happened. I attended three different elementary schools and moved once during kindergarten, but I just kept going to the Yamaha school wherever we were.
When I began a more fundamental musical education at age seven, I had to choose an instrument: either piano or electric organ. I chose the electric organ. By age nine, I was able to read a pocket score of symphonic music and orchestrate it for myself on the instrument—melody, harmony, bass line, and rhythm section all programmed in. That's how I learned all the classical symphonic repertoire—by scores and by ear—and I got really into composing on that instrument as well.
Lawrence: Outside of the United States, the competition scene for young musicians is different and more intense. How did those experiences shape how you think about public performance? Is there anything from that experience that still exists in you today?
Miho: That definitely still carries over today. I have a clear mental image of how I look when I perform on a stage because of those experiences. The higher the level you advance to in competition, the more elaborate the productions become—they even had video directors for those events, so you could watch your own performance on video afterward. Whenever I conduct now, I think I have an easier time imagining how I look from the outside: how I move, how I act on stage.
When I was young, I truly did not feel any nervousness on stage. But the older I got, the more that changed—the intensity hit me much harder. By age fourteen or fifteen, I really had to work on managing my nerves, because my hands were shaking and sweating, and yet I still had to perform. Those experiences definitely helped me learn to stay calm. When something goes unexpectedly wrong on stage while I'm performing, I feel like I understand that feeling from the inside, and I understand how the players are going to react to it. I can respond in a way that calms them down or makes them feel more comfortable rather than adding to the intensity.
Lawrence: That seems like a superpower for a conductor to have—to be able to bring that kind of confidence to the ensemble, so that it feels safer for the musicians.
Miho: So that process all happens in rehearsal. My biggest task as a conductor and director, I would say, is to make musicians comfortable while also motivating them to achieve something a little beyond their usual goal. At the first rehearsal, I always try to work through a mid-level piece with the orchestra to understand what level I can bring them to and what level I should not push them toward. I need to gauge that in the first ten or fifteen minutes. Then I can judge: okay, this is the level I can push to; this might be too much. By the time you're on stage for the concert, you can push further if they're willing—but if you maintain that level of intensity on stage, they'll probably become too overwhelmed. So it's something you have to assess throughout rehearsals to calibrate the level of demand you're making.
Lawrence: What does it mean to push the ensemble or push the musicians? I see the guidance and the management of dynamics that's happening, but I don't think I necessarily understand what that intensity or pushing means—because I don't understand the missing piece between what's on the page and what the conductor is drawing out of the players.
Miho: Well, practically speaking, you can work on things like pitch, rhythmic feel, dynamics, the balance of instruments, and making sure everyone understands their role in the music. Those are things you really have to address in rehearsals. Take a high school band where students don't look at scores—they may not know what role they're playing in the music at a given moment. I have to explain: you're playing a melodic line right now, or a counterpoint, so you can't play that loud. You have to explain it.
For professionals, you don't have to explain it, assuming they study scores beforehand—though sometimes you still do. Once you've worked on all those practical elements in rehearsal, you can assume that everyone remembers and understands them. Then, if you want to make the music a little more magical than purely practical, you can add a kind of color or essence—like a spice—and that's the more emotional dimension, the relationship between human beings playing with human beings for human beings.
If the players actually trust the conductor, they'll feel: “I want to play this as balanced as we rehearsed it, but I also want to play it more movingly.” Just imagine that your beloved dog died yesterday after fifteen years together. Imagine playing the music with that feeling—still balanced from the rehearsal, but so sad. That's the kind of emotional content that transforms practical music into something that reaches the audience, and those messages are most powerful on stage because the shared goal of every player and conductor is to send a musical message to the audience.
Lawrence: When you talk about how the conductor is learning the capabilities of the musicians in rehearsal, what are the musicians learning about the conductor?
Miho: That's something I'm very scared to ask them. (laughter)
Lawrence: But on a practical level, are they learning what this gesture means, that this person speaks a physical language different from the guest conductor we had last week?
Miho: Oh yes, I think so. They're judging and reading everything, looking for signals. They're also judging whether you're a real conductor or not, judging whether the music is good or not, and judging whether the notation is clear or not. If the conductor is giving less information than they need, they need to ask. They're just working to make sure everything is clear for them, so that they can feel more comfortable and confident on stage at the concert.
Lawrence: What drove you to leave Japan for the Manhattan School of Music? What was happening for you, and specifically, what directed you not only to that institution but into jazz studies?
Miho: My major at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo was classical composition, and I received my bachelor's degree in that. At the time, my dream was to be a film composer, so I also spent two years during my junior and senior years studying film composition at the same college. However, the timing was not good for me—jazz composers had started sampling beautiful harmonic material rather than composing for orchestra, and everyone was making music on a computer. Computers are not my thing at all. I basically lost my dream of being a film composer around age nineteen. My professors told me I would have to use a computer—otherwise, I wasn't going to make it in film composition. And I thought: I did not start composing at age seven to write on a computer for the rest of my life.
But at the same time, in college, I joined the big band because I love playing in large ensembles—the genre didn't matter at all. This college’s big band didn't know how to swing because everyone was a classical music student—extraordinarily skilled instrumentalists, but they played terribly in terms of jazz feel. I simply enjoyed playing in that college big band. And that's where I discovered modern jazz composers such as Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, Gil Goldstein, Mike Holober, and Jim McNeely.
I discovered that those jazz composers are all alive, really active, and teaching. I got excited and thought: I've lost my dream anyway—maybe my life is going to change if I actually meet them in person, because I had never had the experience of meeting a living composer hero before. I decided to audition for all the schools where they taught. I was barely accepted to the school where Jim McNeely taught. My English was terrible—I couldn't speak English at all when I came to New York City—so I had a really funny, rough start. But that school had an English class before the semester started, which was why I could manage. I got to study with Jim McNeely for two years at MSM. That's how I got to New York City—the city didn't matter. I just wanted to study with Jim McNeely.
Lawrence: That's very bold. That's an adventure.
Miho: Yeah. But I'd lost my dream anyway, so I didn't know what else to do.
Lawrence: Tell me about studying with Jim—and I'm also curious about your evolving understanding of him and his work now that you are in his place, in the conductor's chair.
Miho: He gave enormous freedom in composition lessons. His ideas were definitely there, but he didn't really express them unless you asked. If I brought a composition to my lesson, he might address a few practical things, but otherwise he'd say: "I think your idea is good—keep going." I sensed he was thinking more, so I started asking more questions: “What do you think about this form? What do you think about this theme? What do you think about this orchestration?” And he did have his opinions—he just didn't want to impose them too strongly, because he had so much respect for each student's originality and authenticity. I really wanted to learn as much as possible from him, so I started asking questions, and we had these really wonderful conversations.
I also asked him to show me his own compositions and explain how he came up with the ideas, so I could see his compositional process. He sketched extensively rather than going straight to Sibelius or a computer—he barely used the computer until near the end of the composition process. He wrote lots of phrases and ideas on paper first. I started doing the same, and that's still my compositional process today, unchanged from my classical composition training.
Beyond the practical lessons, he also gave me insight into how he navigated his career—premiering all his new arrangements and compositions in Europe, with very little happening in New York City, where he lived. He taught in New York and sometimes played with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra at the Village Vanguard, but he didn’t really have his own premieres there. I learned from observing that even one of the top composers makes a living by writing and arranging for European countries and European orchestras, because in the US, jazz is a heritage to preserve rather than something there's a felt need to reinvent. That's still my sense of it now.
Those two years at MSM were truly a bridge between being a student and being a professional musician. The first year after graduation was really rough—I didn't have any work. I made a record and thought I was going to be a superstar after the release, but nobody called me. (laughter) That was a significant miscalculation. But I kept following what Jim essentially did.
Lawrence: I'm curious about the construct for Frames—the way you've built the pieces around the former chief conductors of the Danish Radio Big Band, and how those people, as source material, as inspiration, as prompts, manifested throughout the compositional process.
Miho: I don't think you can recognize it—that's the point. I would like to say that all those compositions are now in my language. However, I do have all the elements of the musical study I did with their compositions embedded in them. So it's not one-to-one; it's more of a combined approach. Even a single moment in a composition—just one chord—might come from something by Thad Jones. You probably wouldn't recognize it as a copy-paste from a Thad Jones composition, because that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to study those compositions first—material that wasn't my usual language or compositional approach, so it was outside my comfort zone—and then I wanted to make that zone my own. It took a long time to learn the music, and even longer to digest it and make it mine.
I think that's the hardest and longest part of the compositional process. Once these elements became my language—once I could say, this is my idea, my version of this dedication—I started composing more freely. Some of the compositional ideas also come more from imagination than from direct influence.
One composition is called “The Pioneer's Quest." The pioneer is Ib Glindemann, the first chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band, and “The Pioneer's Quest” refers to his programming of quite radical, avant-garde music for the radio audience. He was really into Third Stream music, too. My imaginary premise for this piece was: what if Ib Glindemann had actually collaborated with George Russell? It's not musically close to what Ib Glindemann was actually doing—it's more of an imaginary scenario.
Lawrence: It reminds me very much of the approach an improviser takes—studying the technique and then setting the knowledge aside and transcending it in the doing. That sounds like you're describing a very similar process.
Miho: Yeah, I think that's exactly the same. Playing versus writing—that's the only difference.
Lawrence: Tell me about the weight this project carries with McNeely's passing.
Miho: So I was literally composing the piece from the album called "Lulu" around that time. I was lucky enough to see Jim privately about a month and a half before he passed away. I went to his apartment and had a beautiful time with him and his wife—we talked about music, we talked about family. When I left his apartment, I really wanted to say goodbye with a smile and not cry, because I sensed that would be the last time, and it was. I was able to do that—I smiled and said a happy goodbye—and I'm so proud of that. But afterward, on the street in New York City, I ended up sobbing uncontrollably.
Lawrence: New York's a great place to cry on the street. (laughter)
Miho: Exactly. Nobody cares—nobody even looked at me. But that was my last time with him. And one phrase kept coming to my mind the whole time I was crying and walking on the street. That phrase became part of the piece. I also wanted to share this story with the band before we recorded, so I talked to them about it before we played the piece together. It was sad but also beautiful to share. They all felt the same feeling I did. That piece became really, really special to me—not just the piece itself, but playing it with the Danish Radio Big Band, a band that had also shared time with Jim. We felt the same warmth and connection as we made this record together.
Lawrence: It's an incredible lineage to step into, to lead that big band. I'm curious about your experience stepping in front of that ensemble for the first time. What was it like?
Miho: It's funny—my first collaboration with them was not in Denmark. It was in Tokyo, because they came to the Tokyo Jazz Festival as part of a cultural exchange between Denmark and Japan in 2017. The idea was to dedicate a 60-minute concert to 100 years of jazz recordings—the centennial of the first jazz record from New Orleans. But midway through the process, the festival’s producer fell seriously ill and had to step back. So the Danish Radio Big Band's producer and I ended up producing everything ourselves—soloists for each era, a video projection behind the stage, and direction for that.
The guest artists were an incredible range of musicians: Lee Konitz, Terumasa Hino, and Cory Henry were all there. And the band had no idea who I was—they were coming all the way from Denmark to play music with this thirty-year-old Japanese woman.
They were really skeptical at the first rehearsal. Meanwhile, I was trying to put together a medley for Lee to play, because by that point, Lee was no longer playing at full capacity, and he only wanted to play "Darn That Dream" on stage. I really wanted to make him play "Boplicity" with the band. Cory Henry arrived extremely jet-lagged, and I needed him to play an arrangement of mine. I was managing all of these things simultaneously, in front of this skeptical band. But we made it work. When expectations are really low, and something goes well, the reaction is explosive. The band was genuinely happy after the concert came together, and every time they invited me to Denmark afterward, their mood was already welcoming. That was very different from arriving as a stranger and having to prove yourself from scratch.
Lawrence: And I would imagine that must go some way toward helping you assert your compositional identity with an ensemble that has its own history and its own sense of what it is.
Miho: Taking the Danish Radio Big Band position in 2019 was one of the biggest professional developments for me. Since then, my work has been to understand the legacy of the band and carry it forward, while also bringing the band to a new level—to the future, some new excitement. I don't want to keep repeating the same thing over and over because jazz isn’t part of Denmark’s cultural heritage the way it is in the US. For Denmark, it's about new music. So bringing something new—a new artist, new music, a new challenge—is one of my tasks. But I also have to understand and honor their legacy and history. They really need to feel happy on stage, and happiness, respect, and love are genuinely important in their culture, which I love and deeply admire.
Lawrence: How does m_unit fit into all of this? Do you see it being able to continue in the context of all your other commitments?
Miho: I would love that—it's just a matter of time at this point. m_unit is the place where I can be the most musically selfish. (laughter) I love the Danish Radio Big Band; I love m_unit. But writing for the Danish Radio Big Band is a little different from writing for m_unit. Being musically selfish means I can be really experimental or avant-garde, but sometimes that might be outside the Danish Radio Big Band's comfort zone—too far outside their legacy—and I don't want to go that far. They have their brand, and I respect that. With m_unit, I can be a little more radical, because those are the musicians I've specifically chosen to write for that context. With Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands, the compositional approach is different again, because the musicians are different. That's essentially how my compositional thinking operates across different ensembles.
Lawrence: Tell me about the work of an arranger as opposed to a composer, and what the composer learns from arranging. Living inside someone else's compositions goes back to what you described about the Frames construct.
Miho: I think I've learned a great deal from arrangements—through the process of arranging itself more than through composing. When I work as an arranger, I'm studying existing compositions to understand the conventions of a style. Let's say I'm working on game music: I first learn what high-quality game music sounds like, what my client wants, and then I can add a little of my own voice to it. But I don't want to impose my sensibility too aggressively—I have to understand the conventions of that world before I can serve it. I'm hoping that everything I learn this way eventually feeds my compositional imagination. These are things I don't usually work on in my own creative life, so arrangements become a kind of discovery—I feel like I'm gathering inspiration from everyone else to fuel my own compositional thinking.
Lawrence: A feeling, almost. Well, the last thing I wanted to ask: what story are you telling your listeners, or what are you hoping they hear on this record?
Miho: In the end, I want listeners to simply enjoy the music. If you open the box and look more closely at the compositions, you'll discover things—maybe this is from Jim McNeely, maybe this is from Palle Mikkelborg. But simply, I think we worked on this music to express ourselves and our love—unconditional love for each other, unconditional love for music, and unconditional love for Jim McNeely. We had so much respect and love for each other in making this music together, and I'm very, very proud of that. It's a simple statement from us: we love music, and we love each other. And I hope that feeling reaches the audience.
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