Makoto Takenaka Jazz is a piano player and composer, born in New Haven, Connecticut, and brought up in Kyoto, Japan. After graduating with a Magna Cum Laude (BA), at the Berklee College of Music, he became the first Japanese assistant professor in Berklee. He has a long career as a piano instructor in North American institutions such as the Massachussets Institute of Technology or the Boston University. As a performed, he has played in concert halls all over the globe: Moscow, Bucarest, Ottawa, San José de Costa Rica, Brasilia or Seoul, to name a few. Makoto has a repertoire of over 1000 tunes of standard Jazz tunes, Pops, Classical

tunes, and folk songs of the world arrangements. He also integrates Japanese traditional tunes into Jazz-Fusion style and often plays and gives lectures on music theory and jazz arrangement.