After decades of fusing dance and jazz, Takuya Nakamura’s audience has finally flocked to him

Takuya Nakamura Credit: Ryan Chun New York City–based dance producer and multi-instrumentalist Takuya Nakamura started playing trumpet as a child in Japan and fell in love with jazz while growing up. This brought him to Boston in the early 90s, where he studied under jazz pianist George Russell at the New England Conservatory of Music. As Nakamura told DJ Mag in August, he eventually joined Russell’s Living Time Orchestra for a spell. Nakamura also absorbed music constantly outside the context of his formal education, and in 1993 he first heard the relentless rhythms of jungle (usually called drum ’n’ bass in the States) at a Boston venue. He immediately developed a feverish interest in the genre: He learned to DJ and joined a band that improvised jazz-influenced drum ’n’ bass live onstage. By the early 2000s, he’d burned out on those hard-and-fast sounds, but that didn’t change his direction all that much.

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