My new project is Satomi and the sound, featuring myself as a flutist and singer of (mostly) Japanese and (some) American music.

To be perfectly frank, this is something of a marketing experiment/identity exploration. The Pan-Tones have achieved modest success, especially in musical crowds. The people who book us, come to our shows, or otherwise hear our band give us rave reviews.

The challenge is overcoming the initial leap. For a flutist like myself, the Pan-Tones is a “cool” flute group that gets to play “non-traditional” venues. But for a band booker, it’s a big question mark. We’re not a classical ensemble, not a rock/pop/country/etc act, and not even really what people associate with the term world music.

Question mark = more effort for the booker to research our group, and to figure out if we would be appropriate for their event.

On the other hand, SATS is a clearly targeted offering that fits more easily into the idea of what a band is…

-Japanese music/culture is pretty niche, especially here in North Texas.
-My own face is the face of the act. It allows flexibility with the personnel, since as long as I am there, we are still SATS.
-Most venues are used to booking vocal acts- fully instrumental acts are less common.

I am aiming for the look and type of promotional materials to be very “mainstream.” The goal is to make it very easy to answer the question- “should I book this band?”

The funny thing is that I neither identify as Japanese, nor as a singer. Of course, I have Japanese ancestry, but growing up in Hawai’i, I wasn’t self aware of being Japanese (since a majority of people are Asian, many of them Japanese). To me, Japanese meant someone born and raised in Japan.

I have sung for many years, mostly out of practicality, but I started taking lessons for the first time a couple of months ago. So the development of my voice is still in its infancy.

Because of that, this project feels like a bit of a leap for me. It’s a also a unique merging of my specific interests, and has been super fun, interesting, and challenging.

All of the artistic choices are my personal decisions. What music to play, how to arrange it, how to package it, how to release it, etc. It’s both overwhelming and very satisfying.