Michiru performs with Indonesian singer Dewi Sandra in Jakarta.

To define her music is a challenge. A curious combination of jazz, dance, pop and soul, the Japanese singer and songwriter has created a new strand of infectious music, a style that seems to transcend the boundaries of traditional genres and resist all attempts to confine it to a single generic box.

A strikingly beautiful woman, the 48-year-old musician is a vision. Her long silky black hair frames delicate yet piercing features. It is not hard to see why Michiru has been chosen as a new endorser of local Indonesian makeup brand, Martha Tilaar’s PAC line of cosmetics — a role which she takes on with true humility.

“Really?! Me?” jokes Michiru, “It really is incredibly flattering”. Her modesty comes as a shock, a true veteran of jazz music who has collaborated with the likes of Bassment Jaxx, Michiru remains pleasantly unsure of her own abilities.

“The group is really good, everybody really locks into each other and Dewi [Sandra] has such a phenomenal voice, it’s such a pleasure to hear them and hopefully I’ll be in there and not kill it”, Michiru comments on the collaboration concert she performed recently with popular Indonesian singer Dewi Sandra.

This is the third time Michiru has visited Jakarta. Previously, she was in the city in 2007 for JakJazz jazz festival.

“The traffic jams have always been bad. But I’m with the Pac team now, and so I am surrounded by incredibly fashionable people. I’ve just been glamor stricken by the beauty around me,” she says.

While Michiru is oblivious to her own beauty, she cannot help but gush about her new friend, Dewi.

“I’ve always known that Indonesian women are incredibly beautiful and hypnotic, but seeing one so close and watching her [Dewi], it’s like watching a doll talking.”

Not only is her modesty striking, but so is her honesty. “I’m very simple with my makeup, my daily makeup is nothing” she admits.

This humility and laid back attitude to life doesn’t seem to fit together with the statuesque woman standing before me — a woman not only beautiful and talented but who has been attributed with the astounding role of pioneering the acid jazz genre in Japan.

Michiru’s refreshing incoherency could be a result of the huge net that she casts to gather inspiration.

“For me life is a big inspiration. It sounds incredibly clichéd but it really is. It could be anything in the environment; it could a passer-by making a flailing noise. It could be a stereo clunking down. It could be the car making the wrong noise. It could be anything.”

For Michiru, life is one big mix, and how could it not be. Of Japanese and Italian heritage, the singer was born in Tokyo, grew up in California, and now lives in New York.

While her heart may lie in music, the talented Michiru has tried her hand at many professions, and is ever grateful for her acting role in Hikaru Onna (Luminous Woman).

“A milestone for me would be when I was 23, and picked up for a movie in Japan. It was my way into the industry.”

This all-encompassing approach is not restricted to her career choices, but all aspects of Michiru’s life, including food.

“I love food. I love eating it and cooking it. Being that I am Japanese and Italian, I have the tendency to fuse those two.” Fusing seems to be one of Michiru’s favorite things to do, particularly in her music.

At the night’s performance, the singer opened with a song from one of her earlier albums, Delicious Poison, “Will you love me tomorrow” — a song written under the spell of infatuation she had with Brazilian music at the time.

This Brazilian love affair is one that has lasted, and Michiru closed her solo set with a cover of a Brazilian song called “Bridges”, which would appear in her upcoming album, Soulception.

Any traces of insecurity that were revealed earlier in the day were nowhere to be seen when Michiru set foot on stage. The singer moved organically along to the beat of her music and the power of her voice had the audience immediately captivated.

While her personality may be refreshingly down to earth, Michiru’s music is truly out of this world.

— Photos by Katherine Nugent —

The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.

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