By Laura Lane
After all, the salutatorian was voted most musical, and everyone knew he was extremely talented.
But the road the pianist and French horn player traveled to become the musician he is today was anything but ordinary. Katz found success in Japan, and was able to pursue his dream by working during the day as a Japanese translator, a form of employment not ordinarily chosen by artists.
Katz¹s parents had always told him that he would need an alternate career to rely on for an income. ³I was the music guy in school, but when I applied to colleges, I didn¹t apply to any music schools,² said Katz, adding that his parents, William Katz, the former director of EMHS¹s music department, and Gloria, had always encouraged him both academically and musically. ³My parents wanted me to have something to fall back on, so I applied to Ivy League colleges and ended up having to make a decision between Harvard and Yale. I became a mathematics major at Yale.²
But Katz was miserable studying math. So he switched his major to music in his third year, and made a summer tour in Japan with Yale¹s concert band. The trip would forever change Katz.
³I liked what I saw over there, the sense of order,² he recalled. ³Trains ran on time, it was clean, and people were so nice. The countryside was beautiful. I fell in love with Japan.²
Katz decided that after graduation he would move to Japan. He studied Japanese intensively during his senior year. ³I could have coasted, but I didn¹t,² he said. ³I knew I wanted to go there.²
Uncertain how he would make the move, never mind how he would support himself, Katz investigated the idea further when he received a fellowship from Yale to study in Japan. For eight months he worked at the Yamaha Music Foundation. He learned about the company¹s educational system and continued to work on his Japanese.
The experience was gratifying, but a phone call from back home led Katz to leave Japan before completing his fellowship. Martin Dreiwitz, the conductor of the Long Island Youth Symphony, asked him to join the orchestra¹s five-week Southeast Asian tour. Katz, an alumnus of the student orchestra, was asked to be a chaperone and lead the French horn section.
Thoroughly enjoying playing again, Katz decided to enroll in graduate school to further his musical studies, though he still planned to move to Japan. At the Eastman School of Music, he not only completed his musical education, but took additional Japanese classes as well.
After graduating from Eastman in 1991, Katz moved to Japan with plans to work at Yamaha as a teacher. However, the company had other ideas about how to best utilize Katz. ³What they really wanted me to do was help expand their publishing in the United States and Europe,² recalled Katz, who worked for the company as both a teacher and a proofreader of Yamaha¹s textbooks. ³They transferred me to the music publishing department hoping I¹d sign on the next Billy Joel, but they didn¹t have the cash.²
Yamaha sent Katz to Hollywood, where he met a variety of people in the music business and listened to amateur bands. The experience was bittersweet, reminding him that he was a musician who wasn¹t performing. ³I wasn¹t playing much at that time, and I missed it,² Katz recalled. ³I was practicing quite a bit what I¹d learned at Eastman, and I¹d jam on the weekends.²
But that wasn¹t enough. Katz left Yamaha in 1994, but not before setting up a plan to work with one of the company¹s Japanese producers. He made his first CD with this producer, ³Haven¹t You Heard,² featuring the Jonathan Katz Trio and including eight hit songs by the Japanese pop artist Chage & Aska, arranged by Katz.
Although he was doing great musically, Katz realized that he would need to find a job in order to stay in Japan. He began working with a translation company in 1995, and continued there for this company for 10 years. ³I made an agreement with them to only work three days a week, and I continued working on my music,² he explained. ³I translated many different types of documents, from letters to documents from the Japanese government.²
Katz continued to write and arrange songs for his trio, and later for a quintet. He played at parties and events and began to make a name for himself. Now living in Tokyo, he met the woman who would become his wife. Katz and Hiroe married in 2002.
When the translation company, seeing that Katz was increasingly busy working at night as a musician, it offered him the chance to work out of his home. Katz happily joined a translation database. ³It was then that I realized that I wasn¹t making enough money, so I stopped working for the translation company and got work on the database,² he said. ³One reason why I did so well is because there are plenty of Japanese people who can understand and write English, but I was a native.²
He did so well translating Japanese that he found he had even more time for his music. In 2002, Katz began working with a Japanese bamboo flute player, Bruce Huebner, as musical director, pianist and hornist for the jazz group Candela. He contributed compositions and arrangements to the group¹s albums and toured Japan and Europe with Huebner.
Candela, a five-piece band, toured North America twice, playing original music as well as Japanese folk songs that Katz turned into jazz fusion. ³That went over well, but we didn¹t get the record deal,² said Katz, adding that this was a particularly exciting time in his career. ³We played at the Toronto 2003 Downtown Jazz Festival, Joe¹s Pub and the Blue Note.²
In 2003, Katz rekindled a friendship when he worked with Dave Pietro, whom he¹d met at a summer music school in New Hampshire in high school. Pietro had moved to New York to teach at a music school, and contacted Katz¹s father. The pair formed a group, the New York-Tokyo Connection, and their cross-Pacific collaboration included Pietro, an alto saxophonist, Katz on piano, bassist Kaiki Yasukagawa and drummer Yoshihito Eto. The group toured Japan and the U.S., and released a CD in 2006, ³Live in Tokyo.²
The New York-Tokyo Connection is in New York now, set to perform in Manhattan, at the legendary Blue Note, as well as in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Katz is enjoying visiting with his family, who he only sees a couple of a times a year. And he¹ll be visiting EMHS too, to play and then work with some of the students.
Kept busy with his music, he now works only sporadically as a translator. ³I now make enough income from music that I don¹t need to do the translations anymore,² said Katz. ³But I do do jobs that are interesting, like the translation of a Japanese journalist interviewing Bob Woodward. I¹ve got my fallback job translating Japanese, which I wouldn¹t want to do every day, but it beats a lot of other things.²
Katz still loves Japan. ³It is a culture of good manners, consideration for others,² he said. ³There are very few Œbad neighborhoods¹ in Japan. And people enjoy live music. All over the country, people pay to hear live jazz.²
For further information on Katz or for a performance schedule, log on to www.jkatz.net or e-mail him at jonathan@jkatz.net.
If you know of any Salisbury or East Meadow graduates who have gone on to make a difference or are pursuing an unusual career, contact Laura Lane at LLane@liherald.com.
