JUNKO YAGAMI: Pop Meets Jazz on Route 66

What happens when Japan's City Pop meets New York jazz? Nobody knows. That's exactly the point. This isn't a tribute show. This isn't 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 won't be. Junko Yagami's 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 couldn't 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 York's 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.