Home » Jazz Musicians » Noriko Ueda
Noriko Ueda
Noriko was a B.E.S.T. scholarship recipient and majored in Jazz Composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston where she graduated in 1997, relocated to Brooklyn, New York in 1998.
Noriko Currently performs and tours with various groups including the legendary singer Grady Tate Quintet, Ted Rosenthal Trio, the DIVA Jazz Orchestra, DIVA Jazz Trio, Five Play and she also leads her own big band “ Noriko Ueda Jazz Orchestra”. Some of the venues that she has appeared include Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Apollo Theatre, Blue Note, Dizzy's Coca Cola and Birdland. She has also performed with Frank Wess, Kenny Barron, Victor Lewis, Gary Bartz, Nancy Wilson, Roy Haynes, Joe Chambers, Steve Nelson, Junior Mance, Larry Willis, Lew Tabackin, Gregory Hutchinson and many others.
Noriko is the winner of the third annual BMI Foundation/Charlie Parker Jazz composition Prize for her original big band piece "Castle in the North" (2002).
Awards
BMI Foundation/Charlie Parker Jazz composition Prize (2002)
Tags
Ted Rosenthal Trio: The Good Old Days
by Dan McClenaghan
In 2024, Ted Rosenthal dove deeply into the piano trio tradition. High Standards, The Ted Rosenthal Songbook and Classics Reimagined: Impromptu were all released in 2025, all on the TRM Music label. The Good Old Days, the fourth album from those bountiful sessions, released in 2026, presents Rosenthal's vision via multiple moods and thematic twists as his two trios explore early jazz styles, interpreting them in a modern style. Rosenthal's style is ebullient, in the manner of Ahmad ...
Continue ReadingErica von Kleist: Picc Pocket
by Jack Bowers
Those who favor puns and clever wordplay should get their kicks from the song titles alone on Picc Pocket, a splendid new recording by piccolo guru Erica von Kleist 's hand-picced--and fun-loving-- quartet and its spicc-tacular guest artists, trombonist Jennifer Krupa and tenor saxophonist John Ellis. The piccolo (a close cousin of the flute) isn't often heard in a jazz context, which makes the enterprise even more picc-taking and picc-turesque. Von Kleist is a master of the instrument ...
Continue ReadingThe Birdland Big Band: Storybook: The Music of Mark Miller
by Jack Bowers
Storybook, the third recording by the jny: New York City-based Birdland Big Band, is subtitled the music of Mark Miller" and is designed to showcase compositions and arrangements by that multi-talented artist who doubles (triples) as the band's lead trombonist. Miller wrote or co-wrote half of the album's 10 colorful and impressive numbers (11 if one counts Joaquin Rodrigo's brief Concerto de Aranjuez," which serves as an introduction to Chick Corea's Spain") and arranged all of them. ...
Continue ReadingArtemis: Arboresque
by Mike Jurkovic
The virtuoso musicians of Artemis--pianist Renee Rosnes trumpeter Ingrid Jensen saxophonist Nicole Glover bassist Noriko Ueda, and drummer Allison Miller --get down to business quick on their third for Blue Note Arboresque. A testament to collaborative intuition and instinct, Arboresque may vary more in tempo and mood than its acclaimed predecessors--2023's ringing In Real Time and 2020's standard-setting debut Artemis--but it never lacks purpose or promise. It never goes looking for something it does not find. Jumping off with unsung pianist Donald Brown's ...
Continue ReadingDiva Jazz Orchestra: "30": Live at Dizzy's Club
by Jack Bowers
The 30" in the title of the superlative all-woman Diva Jazz Orchestra's latest album stands for 30 years, which, believe it or not, is how long the orchestra and its remarkable drummer and leader, Sherrie Maricle, have been up and running and making beautiful music at home and abroad. Among U.S.-based big bands, it would seem that only Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Woody Herman have had longer runs than that. Fast company indeed. So is Diva ready for comparisons? ...
Continue ReadingThe DIVA Jazz Orchestra: Swings Broadway
by Jack Bowers
At the ripe old age of thirty (closer to a hundred in big-band years), the superlative New York-based, all-female DIVA Jazz Orchestra remains as frisky as a newborn colt, swinging up, down and around Broadway with abandon on its thirteenth album, a brisk and colorful tribute to the Great White Way that shines brightly from start to finish. The album opens and closes in a mid-1950s vein, raising the curtain with Steven Feifke's breezy, well-grooved arrangement of ...
Continue ReadingArtemis: Artemis
by Mike Jurkovic
It's truly exhilarating yet sadly mundane and reductive that a recording as vital and victorious as Artemis will be universally hailed as a first from an all-female supergroup. That it cuts across all generational, cultural, international, and ethnic planes. That Blue Note Records has expanded its ever legendary ranks to include, well, you know, a female group. It's like the more we think we've gotten past these worn, tired types of qualifiers we realize all the more we really haven't. ...
Continue ReadingPhotos
Music
Any Way
From: The Runner UpBy Noriko Ueda
Salt Water
From: The Runner UpBy Noriko Ueda





