A Music Beyond Its Lineage: Hiromi’s Sonicwonder at the Barbican
- Fritz Kurz
- Nov 25
- 9 min read
When
21 November 2025
Where
Barbican Hall, London
Who
Hiromi Uehara
Sonicwonder
James Copus
What
One of the highly anticipated performance of EFG London Jazz Festival: Hiromi’s Sonicwonder — live performance featuring Hiromi (piano, keyboards), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Hadrien Feraud (bass), Gene Coye (drums), with special guest James Copus (trumpet).
Why
Knowing Hiromi for many years only through recordings and videos—solo, in her Trio Project, with Sonicbloom, and now with Sonicwonder—the Barbican concert on 21 November was, the first time I had seen her live.
Live Notes
A Canon Under Pressure
The concert was introduced by a Guardian critic, who presented Hiromi as one of the newest additions to the pantheon of jazz greats—named in the same breath as figures such as Pharoah Sanders and Herbie Hancock. For a brief moment I hesitated. The very notion of a canon has been under heavy attack since the second half of the twentieth century. In classical music, invoking “the canon” today immediately draws attention to its mechanisms of exclusion: the power of institutions, the selective violence of curricula and programming, the overwhelming dominance of western, white, male composers. To speak of “the” canon without irony is already to raise eyebrows.
In jazz, this situation is more paradoxical. On the one hand, we all think we know who belongs to its central pantheon: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, to name only the most indisputable. Their music is surrounded by a constellation of standards, archetypal solos, and historically charged recordings, endlessly transcribed, quoted, and re-actualised. In this sense the jazz canon is not merely a list of works or artists but a set of obligatory passages: recordings and pieces through which one is expected to travel in order to become recognisably “a jazz musician”.
On the other hand, jazz’s own historical self-understanding is oriented toward transformation, rupture, and the invention of new temporalities. Each major moment— bebop, modal jazz, free jazz, fusion, the proliferating post-1990 genealogies—defines itself by breaching a boundary that earlier institutions had tried to stabilise. The canon in jazz therefore cannot simply be a canon of stable forms. It can only be a canon of breaks: a retrospective ordering of decisive gestures that, in their own time, unsettled the very criteria by which canonicity could be measured.
This makes the idea of a jazz canon structurally unstable. If those we call “great” are precisely those who fracture inherited vocabularies, the canon can never be a closed museum of styles. It becomes an archive of fault-lines. To declare someone “the latest addition” to such a canon is less to fix them in place than to pose a question: what, in their music, constitutes a genuine shift of language rather than an intensification of existing ones?
Hiromi’s Position
Hiromi occupies a curious, perhaps symptomatic place within this unstable canon. She is uniquely fluent across jazz history, with a famously devout relationship to Oscar Peterson—she opened for his final trio tour in Japan in 2006—and a clear debt to Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and the whole lineage of pianists who negotiated classical technique with jazz improvisation. She moves between ragtime stride, bebop figuration, quartal harmony, fusion-era keyboard textures, and prog-rock riffs with the speed of a passing thought.
It is tempting to reduce all this to “technique”, and her sheer technical reliability arguably surpasses that of many of the figures to whom she is constantly compared. But the more interesting question is what this technique is in the service of. Hiromi’s idiom is an almost delirious synthesis: stride piano collides with stacked fourths, Zappa-like fusion lines, funk ostinati, and the complex time-signature changes of progressive rock. The result is delivered at a level of clarity and precision that, in purely pianistic terms, places her among the most technically assured performers jazz has produced.
Yet this very density of reference also marks a distance from the kinds of innovation associated with the canonical names mentioned earlier. Parker, Coltrane, even Corea in his most decisive moments, changed the underlying vocabulary: they reconfigured the grammar of lines, harmony, form, or ensemble interaction. In Hiromi’s case, one often has the impression of an extreme synthesis and acceleration of already established idioms rather than the inauguration of a genuinely new one. Even the much-discussed “classical” influence—something long since familiar from Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Jarrett and others—no longer appears as a rupture but as a further intensification of an existing hybrid.
The Concert
All of this was still turning in my mind when Hiromi and the other three members of Hiromi’s Sonicwonder—Adam O’Farrill, Hadrien Feraud, and Gene Coye—took the stage and, within seconds, dissolved any neat theoretical considerations about the “canon” . They opened with the now notorious “XYZ” from her debut album Another Mind, a piece whose theme has acquired a kind of cult status among musicians. The composite metre—variously notated but here felt as something like 9/16 + 4/8 + 9/16 + 3/8—immediately forced the audience into a different sense of pulse: too irregular to settle into comfort, too insistently grooving to be experienced as mere complication. From the first bars the band demonstrated a level of synchronisation, accuracy, and mutual control that was frankly shocking. By the time Feraud launched into his first bass solo, the Barbican was already won over.
Having seen many jazz musicians over the past decades, some of whom are routinely claimed as “greats”, what unfolded on this stage felt calibrated on another scale. Before any extended improvisation had taken place, Sonicwonder already resembled, in its compositional density and rhythmic precision, the world of bands like Animals as Leaders or Tigran Hamasyan’s more prog-inflected projects: labyrinthine unison lines, abrupt metric shifts, and a control over form that can only come from countless rehearsals and shared band history. But within two bars of Feraud’s solo it was clear that we had moved somewhere else again. Playing electric bass in an effortless alternation of slapped figures and legato runs, he navigated the shifting accents and implied modulations with a kind of casual ferocity, never sacrificing sound or time. The solo did not feel like an embellishment of the written material so much as its continuation on another plane, as if the composition itself had sprouted an additional, improvising limb.
In that moment, the language of canon and pantheon felt oddly beside the point. What was shown on stage was an extreme present tense: a music that, while built from existing vocabularies, produced an intensity that made one briefly understand why, despite all the justified suspicion surrounding the word, critics still reach for “canon” when they encounter something like this. Suddenly all critiques of “mere synthesis” no longer registered as accusations of insufficiency. If anything, it may be exactly what makes Hiromi emblematic of a late-canonical moment: a stage at which the historical innovations of jazz have been internalised so thoroughly that their recombination can reach previously unimaginable levels of complexity and energy, without necessarily producing a new dialect. She appears less as the founder of a new school than as the point at which multiple histories converge and are driven, with exhausting force, to their limits.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Because while Feraud was showing that he was operating at the highest level all by himself, I noticed something about Hiromi that perhaps only a live setting allows one to grasp fully: her comping. Giving the other band members centre stage until late into the song, Hiromi was content to remain in the role of accompanist—yet in the most meaningful way possible. As many pianists, guitarists and others will attest, comping is the secret mastership of jazz improvisation. It is rarely as immediately dazzling as an elaborate solo, but to find one’s own voice in this category deserves its own credit and comes with its own demands: a finely tuned ear for one’s fellow musicians, an unshakeable sense of time, and the intuition of when to step back and when to assert oneself.
Hancock, if anything, was an exceptional comping player. I sometimes feel more capable of recognising his playing from the way he accompanies others than from his own solos. Hiromi must have eaten his records by the spoonful; otherwise it is difficult to explain the level of expertise and dedication she displayed long before playing the first note of her own solo.
Before that moment arrived, however, it was Gene Coye and Adam O’Farrill’s turn to take centre stage. While Coye’s solos did not fill me with the same kind of awe that Feraud had inspired minutes earlier, he maintained throughout the evening a solid, reliable backbone for the band. If Feraud was revelatory as a whole, his style is too volatile—at too many parties at once—to be bound to simple rhythm-section duties. It was here that Coye held the whole thing together.
Meanwhile O’Farrill has, over the past years, established himself as one of the most striking trumpet improvisers of his generation, moving between New York’s avant-leaning small groups and more straight-ahead contexts with equal ease. His playing combines a dry, centred tone with an almost conversational phrasing: lines that begin in tightly coiled, bop-inflected figures and then unfurl into wide intervallic leaps or sudden bursts of upper-register intensity. At rapid tempos he threaded this restless, slightly angular language through Hiromi’s and Feraud’s rhythmic grids with total assurance. The youngest member of the group made it abundantly clear that this is where he belongs, even at such an early stage of his career.
All of them had earned their ranks by the time Hiromi began her own solo, moving, as she is known to, between grand piano and her two Nord keyboards, binding together decades of styles once more: George Duke-inflected fusion synth lines—with an almost theatrical use of the pitch wheel—colliding with grand-piano runs reminiscent of Oscar Peterson or Chick Corea. All of this appeared, impossibly, in one crisp, tightly argued solo. From here on out the concert unfolded without surrendering anything of its initial force. The band moved into Out There, the four-part suite from the Sonicwonderland project: beginning with “Takin’ Off,” then into the restless, slightly mischievous “Tidal Wave,” passing through the groove-driven “Strollin’,” and closing with the expansive, questing gestures of “The Quest.” Played without interruption, the suite functioned less as a sequence of pieces than as a single, continuously modulating environment through which the band travelled with absolute authority.
The Encore
The concert ended with standing ovations and the unmistakable sense that what had been witnessed would not soon fade. Yet as if to intensify this impression even further, Hiromi opened the encore alone, with her rendition of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” In this stripped-down moment she seemed to negotiate directly with the audience, turning toward us on certain chords and phrases as if to ask, almost teasingly: did you hear that? One felt a performer whose command was not only technical but atmospheric; someone capable of shaping the room itself simply by directing her attention outward. I do not know how many decades it takes to reach this level of presence, this ability not merely to play for an audience but to guide it, mould it, make it complicit in the smallest inflection of a line.
The concert closed with a guest. London-based James Copus, who has rapidly gained recognition in recent years for his combination of crystalline tone, fluid upper-register control, and unusually compositional approach to improvisation, joined the stage. Having substituted for Adam in three of the Netherlands dates earlier in the month, he was invited to finish the European tour together with the full group. Closing with the title track “Sonicwonderland,” audiences at the Barbican were able to witness an unprecedented, perhaps never-to-be-repeated formation: a quintet built around two of the most promising young trumpet players on the planet. Watching Copus take his solo with the poised, forward-leaning concentration that characterises his playing, one sensed O’Farrill regarding him with a mixture of camaraderie and competitive spark. When Adam entered, he delivered his finest solo of the evening—rapid lines, daring rhythmic displacements, and a final ascent into the upper register executed with a nonchalance that bordered on defiant.
Afterglow
The band left the stage again under standing ovations, and I am sure that if the sudden lighting of the hall had not imposed its unmistakable signal of finality, the audience would have remained, calling them back for yet another encore, and another after that. There was a shared sense that something unusually complete had unfolded. Not complete in the sense of closure or resolution, but complete in the way an evening occasionally aligns: when players of extraordinary ability find themselves in a formation that amplifies, rather than competes with, each individual voice.
What lingered was not merely admiration but an afterglow, the feeling that one had witnessed a group operating at the very edge of its own capacities yet without strain, without display. In contrast to some of the other concerts at this London Jazz Festival, Sonicwonder did not need to present itself with attitude. It simply unfolded at a level rarely reached, leaving in its wake a quiet astonishment that such evenings still occur—moments in which the music justifies itself without proclamation, but by the sheer force of its own momentum.
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