Midori Takada

Percussion, by way of Berlin and Africa

Midori Takada was born on December 21, 1951 in Tokyo, studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts and began percussion at 13 after learning piano as a child. Japanese Wikipedia has her taking third place in the percussion division of the Munich International Music Competition in 1977 and making a soloist debut with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1978. English Wikipedia says she began with the RIAS Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin in the mid-1970s, grew dissatisfied with the Western classical tradition, and on returning to Japan studied African drumming, Indonesian gamelan and early minimalism by Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

She played in the Mkwaju Ensemble, whose albums Mkwaju and Ki-Motion came out in 1981 (the line-up is given differently by different sources; Wikipedia names Joe Hisaishi, Yoji Sadanari, Junko Arase and Hideki Matsutake), and later in the improvising trio Ton-Klami with Masahiko Satoh and Kang Tae-hwan. She wrote and performed music for Tadashi Suzuki's theatre productions, including Electra in 1996. Later records include Nebula (1987, with Mayumi Miyata), African Percussion Meeting (1989, with Kakraba Lobi), Lunar Cruise (1990, with Satoh), Tree of Life (1999), Le Renard Bleu (2018, with Lafawndah), An Eternal Moment (2019, with Kang Tae Hwan) and Until I Met You (2025, with Jakob Bro).

A track from Through the Looking Glass was uploaded to YouTube without permission in 2013 and passed a million views before removal, and WRWTFWW began reissuing her work in 2016. In 2020 she composed a new score for The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima after the director Otto Bell asked to use the 1983 album. Setlist.fm lists her concerts from Le Guess Who? in Utrecht in November 2018 through Primavera Sound in 2019 and the RISING festival in Melbourne in June 2022.