“I am looking for a certain tree in this place,” says Sumi Tonooka.
She is walking along a gravel path at the Morris Arboretum & Gardens in Chestnut Hill, on a sweltering summer afternoon. The acclaimed pianist-composer is retracing her steps, in a sense. “My mom and my dad used to take us here on the 23 trolley,” she explains, recalling regular visits to the arboretum throughout her childhood.
Tonooka (pronounced To-NO-O-ka) will turn 69 this fall, and she has recently been contemplating roots — her own, as well as those in the natural world. Her expressive new album, Under the Surface, features a seven-part suite inspired, as she writes in a composer’s note, “by the roots of trees and how they work together as underground systems to support the survival of all trees, even outside of their own species.”
This idea of mycorrhizal networks, to use the botanical term, has a strong parallel in society — and in creative ecologies, as Tonooka points out. She composed her new suite for the Alchemy Sound Project, a multigenerational artist collective that relies on similar models of mutual support. The members of the Project — tenor saxophonist Erica Lindsay, multi-reedist Salim Washington, bassist Gregg August, trumpeter Samantha Boshnack, and trombonist Michael Ventoso — appear on the album alongside a featured guest, the brilliant drummer Johnathan Blake.
Here, too, the metaphor of a root system can be said to apply. “Johnathan is family,” affirms Tonooka, who performed with his father, the esteemed violinist John Blake, for more than 30 years. (The younger Blake paid tribute to his father with the 2023 album Passage. He has another Blue Note release due out next month: My Life Matters, a suite composed during the height of #BlackLivesMatter protests.)
The association with John Blake is one of many that has defined Tonooka’s jazz career. She spent a formative stretch, from age 19 into her early 20s, as the pianist with Philly Joe Jones, the legendary hard-bop drummer. In his band, she played alongside bassist and composer Jymie Merritt. She later worked with an array of Philly jazz luminaries — like saxophonists Sonny Fortune, Odean Pope and Bootsie Barnes — before moving to New York, where she formed a trio with drummer Akira Tana and bassist Rufus Reid. They joined her on her auspicious debut, With an Open Heart, in 1990.
Tonooka has since racked up experience and accolades, like a 2023 Pew Fellowship. A decade earlier, she was selected to take part in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Intensive, a joint program of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the American Composers Orchestra. Her summer intensive at the Herb Albert School of Music at UCLA led to the creation of her first symphonic work, “Full Circle.” The American Composers Orchestra performed its premiere in 2014.
Tonooka moved to the Seattle area around this time, seeking equilibrium after a divorce. She plunged into studying orchestration, and found herself energized by the challenge. A concerto for orchestra and jazz trio — “For Malala,” dedicated to the Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai — was premiered by Seattle’s Northwest Symphony Orchestra in 2016. Several years later, Tonooka was one of four finalists in the Emerging Black Composers Project, which led to another orchestral work, “Only The Midnight Sky And Silent Stars,” being premiered by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra.
It was her experience in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Intensive that led Tonooka to conceive of the Alchemy Sound Project. “I was hanging out with the other composers,” she says. She could picture how rewarding it might be to compose for one another, and perform the work, in ongoing collaboration.
Alchemy Sound Project released three albums prior to Under the Surface, the most recent being 2021’s Afrika Love, which received a four-star review in DownBeat. (In the review, veteran writer Herb Boyd singled out Tonooka’s contribution, “Dark Blue Residue,” as “a study in brilliance.”) The August issue of the magazine includes another four-star review — of Under the Surface. Tonooka’s skills as a composer, strengthened over the last decade, have never had a more vivid showcase.
But Tonooka is quick to share credit with her collaborators, noting how selflessly they brought the material to life. She raves about the precision and passion with which Blake attacked the material — something that’s obvious within the first few seconds of the album’s opener, “Points of Departure.” Tonooka created a video for the song, featuring images of nature, including one huge and striking tree, with branches stretching out as if to mirror the roots in the ground below. This is the tree she is looking for at Morris Arboretum on this sunny afternoon. “It’s really kind of a friend,” she says as we search.
For Tonooka, horticulture and social activism both come as a birthright.
Her maternal grandfather was a railroad worker who grew strawberries on Bainbridge Island, which sits in Puget Sound, a half-hour from Seattle by ferry. Tonooka’s mother, Emi, grew up on Bainbridge until age 16, when an executive order directed the 227 Japanese-American residents of the island to “evacuate” to Manzanar — making the Tonookas one of the first families swept up in wartime concentration camps.
After the war, they joined a wave of Japanese-Americans who resettled in the Philadelphia area. “They came to Philly because it was, quote-unquote, ‘The City of Brotherly Love,’ and they thought that sounded good,” Tonooka says, with a laugh.
Her mother and father “were both radicals, activists,” she recalls. “They met writing an anti-McCarthy leaflet together. It wasn’t even a date, it was how they met. My mom tells me it was love at first sight.”
Her father, Clarence Lawrence Morris, was an African-American machinist for the Campbell’s Soup Company in Camden. Her mother worked as a secretary for the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. They chose to live near campus, for strategic reasons: “During those times — I mean, they specifically chose Powelton Village because they were an interracial couple,” Tonooka recalls, “and they wanted us to be in an area where we didn’t stick out.”
Growing up, Tonooka and her siblings (an older sister and two younger brothers) navigated a sort of dual citizenship in Philadelphia’s vibrant Black and Asian-American communities. Living in West Philadelphia, she had more of an African-American cultural perspective. The viewpoint broadened slightly when her grandparents moved in. (Her grandfather, the former Bainbridge Island gardener, startled passersby outside their rowhouse with the tomatoes and eggplants he cultivated in the patch of dirt out front.)
For Tonooka’s 13th birthday, her parents took her to the Aqua Lounge on 52nd Street to see Thelonious Monk. This was 1969, five years after he’d been on the cover of Time, but his behavior on the bandstand was erratic. Young Sumi watched and listened in bemusement until the last tune of the set, a transfixing “‘Round Midnight.” On the way home, she told her mother that she was determined to be a jazz musician.
Her parents pulled her out of the public school system around this time, hiring a tutor in the hopes of providing a more liberal and arts-enriched education. By 15, she was done with high school. She headed to Boston, where she connected with two important early piano mentors, the legendary pedagogue Margaret Chaloff, who’d taught everyone from George Shearing to Herbie Hancock, and the jazz guru Charlie Banacos, who came out of the Lennie Tristano school. Several years later, living back in Philadelphia, she began private study with Mary Lou Williams, taking the train to Harlem for lessons in the same apartment where Williams had held salons frequented by Monk, Bud Powell and others.
Tonooka is now a teacher herself, part of the music faculty at both Princeton and Bard. At the former, her fellow instructors on piano are Kris Davis and Angelica Sanchez. At Bard, the small corps of jazz faculty includes Sanchez and Lindsay, while the stable of private instructors includes several more women: violinist Gwen Laster, cellist Akua Dixon, pianist Franceska Tanksley, and saxophonist Jessica Jones. It isn’t lost on Tonooka that this is a fortunate situation: a recent report from the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, titled “Jazz Counts: Measuring the Jazz Faculty Gender Gap in Higher Education,” notes that fewer than 10% of instrumental jazz faculty identify as female.
In collaboration with vocalists Jen Shyu and Sara Serpa, Tonooka has been active in M³ (Mutual Mentorship for Musicians) — a nonprofit dedicated to supporting women and nonbinary artists in and around jazz, through advocacy and educational efforts. (Shyu and Serpa co-founded the organization in 2020.) In addition to serving as a mentor, Tonooka has contributed to the M³ Anthology: her 2021 essay Remembering Philly Joe is a clear-eyed remembrance, neither an indictment nor an apologia. She has also performed on the M³ Festival, though she won’t be a part of this year’s edition, which takes place at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn on Oct. 4.
The Morris Arboretum sprawls across a grand expanse of 92 acres.
Tonooka covers a good portion of them in search of her tree: the Rose Garden, the Pennock Flower Walk, the Orange Balustrade, the Mercury Loggia.
A map is of limited use, despite a section with the header “Tree Collection Highlights.” One such highlight shown on the map is a Weeping Beech. “It might be a weeping beech, but I’m not sure,” she says, walking in the direction of this point on the map. “It has a really wide breadth, with lots of branches. It’s beautiful.”
At one point, walking toward the Hill & Cloud Garden, Tonooka reaches the Swan Pond. “Oh, I definitely remember this,” she says. The sun is bearing down, and she pauses a moment to admire one of the pond’s residents, gliding slowly and impassively across the surface of the water.
Traipsing in the heat, still looking, she reflects on the new phase of prolific output and public recognition that she has enjoyed in what many would consider retirement age. Her evolution as a composer has been a lifelong process, but it found an accelerant within the last 10 or 15 years. Not that anything has come fast or easy, exactly.
Under the Surface, for example, was composed during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, with the support of a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant. “The piece has had a life,” she says. “I got the grant in 2019. Then COVID broke out. So it’s been a long time getting here, you know? The good thing about this particular record is that we were able to actually ingest the music before we went into the recording studio.”
The album undoubtedly benefitted from this ingestion: it feels like a fully realized and expertly drawn work. Its seven parts allow the ensemble a striking range of movement, from the Mary Lou Williams-esque swing of “Saveur” to the odd-metered chamber-funk of “Mother Tongue.” A sauntering trio selection titled “For Stanley” is a tribute to Tonooka’s former teacher Stanley Cowell, who died during the pandemic (but not of COVID). The title track is a modal showpiece set in a polyrhythmic 12/8, with a melodic theme that Tonooka characterizes in her composer’s notes as oscillating “between bright and shadowed colors, evoking a sense of ritual and sonic healing.”
Suddenly, she reaches a clearing, and there it is — the Arboretum’s prized Katsuri tree, or Cercidiphyllum japonicum. Native to Japan and China, this specimen was planted by the Morrises in 1902, and has grown to be one of the largest of its kind in North America. Tonooka and her siblings climbed all over its long, sturdy branches as children. Somehow she’d forgotten that the tree had anything to do with her Japanese heritage.
“What’s really strange is that I didn’t tie it together until you asked me to meet you here,” she says. “Because I was here with my sister not that long ago, and I took some photos. This tree was one of them, and I included it in the video.”
She stands in the shade of the Katsuri, looking up at its canopy. “It’s just funny,” she says. “Yeah. Wow.” Another pause, long this time. “Look at this. So beautiful, isn’t it?”
Sumi Tonooka will perform with Bobby Zankel & Warriors of the Wonderful Sound on Thursday in Hawthorne Park. Under the Surface is available now on the ARC label.
