TOMOKO OMURA

RUN RUN RUN

Outside In Music

Tomoko Omura, violin/composer; Jeff Miles, guitar; Glenn Zaleski, piano; Pablo Menares, bass; Jay Sawyer, drums.

Eighty years after the horrific tragedy of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, violinist Tomoko Omura uses her musical concept, “Run Run Run” as a historical reminder of how devastating war is.  When composing this protest project, she visualized the tiny feet of children racing through a post-atomic New York City in search of family after a bombing. This was the way some survivors of her Japanese heritage remember the aftermath of being bombed.

Omura opens with her original song, “Brooklyn Day.” As I listen, I can imagine the chaos and the panicked feet racing for safety; racing away from the bombs; away from fear; away from fire and death all around them.  Pablo Menares lays down a bass groove.  Then enters Omura on her violin, playing the melody along with Zaleski’s piano. The arrangement is quite contemporary, spotlighting her violin mastery, with Jay Sawyer whipping the drums beneath the arrangement and feeding it energy. Jeff Miles adds a bit of rock/jazz to the mix on his electric guitar.

This production is both a musical suite and an original short story, meant to remind us how quickly history lessons can fade and/or repeat themselves.  With so much civil unrest across the globe, Tomoko Omura has composed several songs that paint musical pictures of what was and what could become a reality on our own soil.

“The Flash” follows. It is chapter two of her musical book. Two words that once were used to describe how it felt to people who experienced and lived through a bombing. “The Flash” communicates what it was like to experience an atomic attack. Tomoko Omura’s violin sings furiously against the rich, powerful drums of Jay Sawyer.

This album “Run Run Run” is a multifaceted piece of art that Omura hopes will fuse fiction and historic truth into a simultaneous exploration into what was and what could be.

“While my ultimate hope is that we can all move toward a world free of nuclear weapons, my immediate goal with this project is to raise awareness about these issues,” Omura writes in her one-sheet press page.

Just the innocent way people were living, breathing, working and playing in Nagasaki that day of the bombing, or in Gaza, or in Sudan, or in Ukraine; that’s how quickly the evil of war can change an ordinary day into despair and destroy a landscape.

“Music has the power to reach people emotionally in ways that statistics and policy discussions cannot. … I believe that’s where real change begins, with understanding and empathy.”

Reviewed by Dee Dee McNeil

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