Biography

Biography Pianist Nora Maki was born in Osaka, Japan. She started her first piano lesson at age 6. She studied classical piano with Katsuyuki Mastui and musicianship with Masaru Adachi at Osaka College of Music.

Encountering jazz music in her late teens has changed her way of making music to her own terms. She studied the piano style of Art Tatum & Oscar Peterson with Minoru Ozone. Interested in jazz & American culture, she was exposed herself to a broad range of American music from Miles Davis to James Brown.

After immigrating to United States of America in 1989, she went back to school and studied advanced jazz arrangement, theory, harmony & history and jazz combo under the direction of Andrew Speight at San Francisco State University.

Her great passion for music has brought her to much broader music communities. She has performed her jazz in various settings and shared the bandstand with many area musicians in San Francisco Bay Area.