Performance: Erika Oba & Scott Oshiro, Contemporary Flute Duet

Erika Oba and Scott Oshiro will present a flute duo program featuring flute, pedals, and electronics. Oba and Oshiro will share their original compositions and improvisations drawing on their shared interest in Japanese, Okinawan, and experimental music. 

Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance, and theater. She has been commissioned by groups such as the Del Sol String Quartet, Fresno Philharmonic, Shotgun Players, and Sharp and Fine. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Erika Oba Trio, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has performed in a wide variety of ensembles with musicians including Meredith Monk, Peter Apfelbaum, Hitomi Oba, Lisa Mezzacappa, Jean Fineberg, Jon Jang, and Francis Wong. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department and a resident music director with Berkeley Playhouse’s Youth Conservatory Program. As an artist, she is interested in exploring cultural practice in diaspora, performance as ritual, and music as a vehicle for exploring our relationships to our communities, histories, and biosphere. 
 

Scott Oshiro is a Bay Area-based flutist, composer, music researcher, and technologist whose work blends his African and Okinawan American heritage with jazz, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism. In 2023, he earned his doctorate in computer-based music theory and acoustic sciences from Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music & Acoustics (CCRMA) and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he studies brain wave activity of jazz musicians during improvisation. As a 2023 Asian Improv aRts Fellow and an inaugural grantee of the Doris Duke Technology and Performing Arts Lab, Scott is researching the intersection between Jazz and quantum computation. Recently, Scott debuted his new ensemble, Deciphering Broken Rhythms Collective, at the 2024 USAAF festival in San Francisco, where they explored the intersection between music, technology, identity, and culture.